Just Foreign Policy News
January 11, 2011
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OAS Plan to Alter Haiti Vote Fails Bush v. Gore Standard of Equal Protection
An OAS team is pushing to alter the preliminary outcome of the disputed Haitian election, based on throwing out some, but not all, tally sheets that fail to meet certain standards.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/oas-plan-to-alter-haiti-v_b_807449.html
*Action: Center for Constitutional Rights: Cheryl Mills: Please Listen to the Haitian People!
Sign the petition asking the State Department to withdraw support for the exclusive and fraudulent electoral process in Haiti. It is not too late for the US to change course and support fair elections. On Friday, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills conceded the US would consider new elections if an OAS report recommended it. Press reports say the OAS will not recommend new elections, but we can tell Chief of Staff Mills that she should listen to Haitian voters, not OAS functionaries.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/383/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5508
*Action: SOA Watch: Tell UN Ambassador Susan Rice to support withdrawal of UN troops from Haiti
Tell Ambassador Rice Haiti does not need UN troops, it needs schools, hospitals, housing, industries and farms. Ask that she calls for a withdrawal of military troops and a redirection of funds to true humanitarian aid.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/727/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5509
Al Jazeera: An insider’s critique of what went wrong in Haiti
Al Jazeera talks to Ricardo Seitenfus, who was the Special Representative of the OAS Secretary General in Haiti, until he criticized the UN mission in Haiti in an interview with a Swiss newspaper. "The presence of the military is contradictory and counter-intuitive with me without talking about the moral questions. With MINUSTAH (U.N. troops in Haiti), we spent $600 million dollars per year this year. $865 million dollars this year alone, I think. That is besides what every member of MINUSTAH spends. So I believe we need to do a balance sheet – an audit almost – to take stock of how we have advanced in this last 6 and half years and to make a new strategy with relation to Haiti. I think we fool ourselves with who the real enemy here. The enemy of Haiti is misery, is lack of hope, the lack of perspective, lack of work, lack of income. Not security."
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2011/01/08/insiders-critique-what-went-wrong-haiti
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The OAS team’s report cannot help determine the outcome of the first round of Haiti’s election, the Center for Economic and Policy Research says. The OAS team focused only on tally sheets that had unusually high voter participation levels. From this subgroup only, the OAS team threw out tally sheets that failed to meet certain criteria. "This methodology really tells us nothing about who really finished second in the first round of the election, even among the small minority of voters that actually voted and had their votes counted," said Mark Weisbrot. Weisbrot noted that the small margin of difference between Martelly and Celestin in the OAS’s recount – 0.3 percent – was too small to statistically distinguish between the two, given the sample size and variance. "This appears to be a political, and not a professional, decision," Weisbrot added.
2) Vice President Biden promised a lasting US commitment to Afghanistan well beyond 2014, when NATO forces are scheduled to turn over security of the nation to Afghan forces, the New York Times reports. Biden promised Karzai the US would continue to provide aid and military training beyond the planned transition deadline of 2014.
3) The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction has resigned under Congressional pressure, the Washington Post reports. An August review of the office by the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency found that its audits were of poor quality and that the office lacked a strategic plan.
4) The assassination attempt on a U.S. congresswoman seems tragically familiar to people in countries where political violence has been routine, and many expressed concern Monday that America’s increasingly polarized politics will lead to more bloodshed, the Arizona Daily Star reports. Zeev Sternhell, a prominent Israeli academic and peace activist, called the shooter’s mental state immaterial. "The argument that someone is not entirely sane does not absolve those whose incitement created the atmosphere for someone less stable to pull the trigger," he said.
5) A group of 173 human rights activists representing the remaining 173 prisoners at Guantanamo rallied in front of the White House to mark the ninth anniversary of the detention center’s opening and to protest the Obama administration’s inability to close it, the Washington Post reports. A coalition of groups, including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows are calling on the administration to either try Guantanamo Bay detainees in federal court or release them. Speakers at the rally criticized the administration for not proceeding with federal trials, countenancing a formal system of indefinite detention and not repatriating nearly 60 Yemenis who were cleared to go home by the administration’s own inter-agency task force.
Iran
6) Defense Secretary Gates said technical glitches and sanctions that have delayed Iran’s nuclear program give the U.S. and its partners more time to exert pressure without resorting to military action, Bloomberg reports. Israel’s outgoing head of intelligence, Meir Dagan, said last week Iran wouldn’t be able to produce a nuclear weapon before 2015, three or four years later than earlier Israeli estimates.
7) Congress is demanding that the Pentagon prepare a "national military strategic plan" for countering Iran’s nuclear and conventional arms build-up, Bloomberg reports. The new provision "appears to reflect the views of those who believe a more well-developed military option" is needed to counter Iran’s potential nuclear weapons program, said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst with the Congressional Research Service.
Afghanistan
8) A NATO airstrike killed three Afghan police officers in central Afghanistan Sunday, the New York Times reports. NATO said it was investigating.
Israel/Palestine
9) Israeli bulldozers demolished part of a landmark building in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem Sunday to make way for a Jewish housing project, prompting condemnation from Palestinian officials and criticism from the U.S., the New York Times reports. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the demolition "is part of the political program of the Israeli government to pre-empt any solution on Jerusalem." Secretary of State Clinton issued a statement calling the demolition a "disturbing development" that "contradicts the logic of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the parties on the status of Jerusalem." UN Secretary General Ban said "inserting settlers into Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem" undermined prospects for addressing the city’s status.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) CEPR Examines OAS Report on Haiti’s Election, Finds It "Inconclusive, Statistically Flawed, and Indefensible"
Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 11, 2011
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/cepr-examines-oas-report-on-haitis-election-finds-it-qinconclusive-statistically-flawed-and-indefensibleq
The OAS report: http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/OAS-Haiti-2011-1.pdf
The CEPR report: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/haitis-fatally-flawed-election
Washington, D.C.- The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has analyzed the Expert Verification Mission’s Final Report from the Organization of American States (OAS) on Haiti’s presidential elections, which has not been released to the public but is now available on the CEPR website [link above]. CEPR’s analysis found that the OAS report cannot help determine the outcome of the first round of Haiti’s election.
"This report can’t salvage an election that was illegitimate, where nearly three-quarters of the electorate didn’t vote, and where the vote count of the minority that did vote was severely compromised," said Mark Weisbrot, CEPR Co-Director and co-author of the report, "Haiti’s Fatally Flawed Election."
CEPR has been unable to find a presidential election in the Western Hemisphere, including Haiti, with such a low turnout, going back to 1947. Haiti’s parliamentary election of 2009, in which the country’s most popular political party was also banned, had a turnout of less than 10 percent.
The OAS report does confirm some of the most important conclusions from CEPR’s analysis of the elections, which was published on Sunday. For example, the OAS finds that 12 percent of the tally sheets were either not received by the Provisional Electoral Council or were quarantined – a much larger number of lost votes than the OAS or the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) had previously publicly acknowledged.
Yet the OAS report concludes that the election should not be re-run, but rather that the results should be changed so that Michel Martelly, rather than the government candidate Jude Celestin, would finish second and therefore proceed to a run-off election.
But it is easy to see that there is no sound basis for such a conclusion. For example, the missing tally sheets came from areas that had a different distribution of votes than the average for the country as a whole – one that favored Celestin. CEPR’s analysis found that if the missing tally sheets had a distribution that was the same as the other tally sheets that were received from the same areas, then Celestin would have finished second, rather than third.
The OAS analysis was also methodologically and statistically flawed in numerous other ways. Unlike the CEPR report, which examined all of the 11,181 tally sheets, and subjected each of the vote totals of the top three candidates to a statistical test to look for irregularities, the OAS team focused on tally sheets that had unusually high voter participation levels. They then subjected this set of tally sheets to the following criteria:
"In accordance with this provision of the law, the Expert Mission set four specific criteria to determine if a PV [tally sheet] should be included: 1) the inclusion or absence of the required signatures of the polling officials on the Procès-Verbal [tally sheet]; 2) the inclusion or absence of the list of registered voters; 3) the presence and accuracy of the CIN [voter national identity] numbers to identify those voters who cast their ballots at that particular polling station; 4) if a Procès-Verbal [tally sheet] had been obviously altered to change the results of the elections, for instance adding a digit to a number to increase a vote total by a hundred or more, that PV [tally sheet] was also excluded."
On this basis, the OAS team threw out 234 tally sheets, and with the remaining tally sheets calculated the results.
"This methodology really tells us nothing about who really finished second in the first round of the election, even among the small minority of voters that actually voted and had their votes counted," said Weisbrot.
Weisbrot also noted that the small margin of difference between Martelly and Celestin in the OAS’s recount – 0.3 percent – was too small to statistically distinguish between the two, given the sample size and variance. "This appears to be a political, and not a professional, decision," Weisbrot added.
2) U.S. Presence In Afghanistan Is Promised Beyond 2014
Ray Rivera, New York Times, January 11, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/world/asia/12afghan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with President Hamid Karzai here on Tuesday and promised a lasting American commitment to the country well beyond 2014, when NATO forces are scheduled to turn over security of the nation to Afghan forces.
"The United States, if the Afghan people want it, are prepared and we are not leaving in 2014," the vice president said during an unannounced visit to Kabul. "Hopefully, we will have totally turned over to the Afghan security forces the ability to maintain the security of the country, but we are not leaving if you don’t want us to leave."
At a news conference at the presidential palace, Mr. Biden promised Mr. Karzai that the United States would continue to provide aid and military training beyond the planned transition deadline of 2014.
[…]
3) IG For Afghanistan War Resigns Amid Pressure From Lawmakers
Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, Monday, January 10, 2011; 8:51 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/10/AR2011011005512.html
The head of the office charged with investigating corruption in the multibillion-dollar effort to rebuild Afghanistan has resigned, the White House said Monday, following congressional demands that the White House replace him.
Arnold Fields, a retired Marine major general, was named special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction in 2008, when the office was first established along the lines of a similar effort that has uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars of waste and fraud in Iraq. Fields’s resignation comes a week after he fired his two deputies, saying the organization needed "new blood."
[…] A bipartisan group of senators, led by Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), asked President Obama in September to "begin the process of removing" Fields based on concerns they had raised repeatedly since early 2009.
The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, is charged with oversight of the $56 billion that the United States has committed since 2002 to nonmilitary development and humanitarian assistance programs.
But an August review of the office by the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency found that its audits were of poor quality and that the office lacked a strategic plan.
[…]
4) Outsiders see shooter as moved by rhetoric
Arizona Daily Star, January 11, 2011
http://azstarnet.com/news/world/article_ac398775-133e-5092-bd71-479753b73e60.html
Bogota, Colombia – The assassination attempt on a U.S. congresswoman seems tragically familiar to people in countries where political violence has been routine, and many expressed concern Monday that America’s increasingly polarized politics will lead to more bloodshed.
Politicians, intellectuals and columnists – including people personally scarred by political violence – said it matters little that evidence so far indicates the man accused in the attack, a 22-year-old social outcast, was mentally disturbed and acted alone. They see him as moved to action by a climate of heated rhetoric.
Zeev Sternhell, a prominent Israeli academic and peace activist, called the shooter’s mental state immaterial. "The argument that someone is not entirely sane does not absolve those whose incitement created the atmosphere for someone less stable to pull the trigger," he said.
The rampage that critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six "indicates just how dangerous it has become to practice politics," said Colombian columnist Maria Jimena Duzan. "It’s sort of a great alarm bell for understanding what’s happening in a society where politics is increasingly being displaced by violence," said Duzan, whose reporter sister Sylvia was a victim of a political assassination in 1990.
In Colombia, death squads employed by drug traffickers and wealthy landowners and often backed by military officers have killed thousands since the 1980s.
[…]
5) Coalition of groups rallies outside White House for closure of Guantanamo Bay
Peter Finn, Washington Post, Tuesday, January 11, 2011; 6:04 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011104335.html
A group of 173 human rights activists, each wearing an orange jumpsuit and a black hood and representing the remaining 173 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, rallied in front of the White House on Tuesday to mark the ninth anniversary of the detention center’s opening and to protest the Obama administration’s inability to close it.
[…] The rally and street theater were organized by a coalition of groups – including Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows – that are calling on the administration to either try Guantanamo Bay detainees in federal court or release them.
"We believe in and promote the rule of law," said Valerie Lucznikowska, whose nephew was killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and who described the military detention center in Cuba as a "living stain on America."
There was little sympathy among the protesters toward President Obama for insisting that he remains committed to closing the prison but has been frustrated at every turn by political opposition on Capitol Hill. Congress has barred the administration from using Defense Department money in 2011 to transfer any detainee to the United States for any purpose.
Obama’s "the guy with the bully pulpit and he hasn’t made the argument," said Tom Parker, policy director for terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights at Amnesty International. "His comments on Guantanamo have been sparing. And there needs to be a great deal more done at the political level."
Speakers at the rally criticized the administration for not proceeding with federal trials, countenancing a formal system of indefinite detention and not repatriating nearly 60 Yemenis who were cleared to go home by the administration’s own inter-agency task force.
[…]
Iran
6) Iran Nuclear Delays Defer Military Action, Gates Says
Bloomberg News, January 11, 2011, 3:31 AM EST
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-11/iran-nuclear-delays-defer-military-action-gates-says.html
Jan. 11 – Technical glitches and sanctions that have delayed Iran’s nuclear program give the U.S. and its partners more time to exert pressure without resorting to military action, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.
"As we say, all options are on the table and we prepare for all options," Gates said today in an interview with Bloomberg Television during a visit to China. "But I think that if we have bought some additional time, that it does give greater opportunity to the political-economic strategy."
[…] Israel’s outgoing head of intelligence, Meir Dagan, said last week Iran wouldn’t be able to produce a nuclear weapon before 2015, three or four years later than earlier Israeli estimates. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday cited the effect of sanctions and technical problems.
[…]
7) Pentagon Must Sharpen Its Military Strategy to Counter Iran, Congress Says
Tony Capaccio, Bloomburg, January 10, 2011
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-10/pentagon-must-sharpen-iran-strategy-to-counter-arms-buildup-congress-says.html
Congress is demanding that the Pentagon prepare a "national military strategic plan" for countering Iran’s nuclear and conventional arms build-up, and to brief lawmakers on it.
The Pentagon additionally must inform lawmakers of "any resources, capabilities, or changes to current law" that officials believe "are necessary to address the gaps identified in the strategy," according to a congressional joint statement accompanying the fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill which President Barack Obama’s signed on Friday.
The provision is the second in as many years directing the military leaders to initiate a specific task pertaining to Iran. Congress last year, in its fiscal 2010 defense bill, required an unclassified report on Iran’s current military capabilities and strategy.
The new section goes further and "appears to reflect the views of those who believe a more well-developed military option" is needed to counter Iran’s potential nuclear weapons program, said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East analyst with the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
The new congressional provision also "appears to suggest there is a belief the U.S. military may need some new systems or equipment to counter that threat," Katzman said.
The Obama administration has said it wants to stick to diplomacy and non-military pressure, such as economic sanctions, to persuade Iran to stop enriching uranium.
[…] Gates, in a February 8, 2010 meeting with French Foreign Minister Herve Morin, said a conventional weapons strike "by any nation," including Israel and the U.S., "would only delay Iranian plans by one to three years, while unifying the Iranian people to be forever embittered against the attacker."
[…]
Afghanistan
8) NATO Airstrike Kills 3 Police Officers In Afghanistan
Ray Rivera, New York Times, January 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/world/asia/11afghan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – A NATO airstrike killed three Afghan police officers in central Afghanistan on Sunday in what Afghan officials said was friendly fire. Two more police officers died Monday in a suicide car bomb attack in the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar Province.
[…] NATO said it was sending an assessment team to investigate the airstrike, which occurred early Sunday morning in the central province of Daykondi. The coalition said a team was conducting a patrol in the village of Baladas when it spotted "nine armed individuals setting up what appeared to be an ambush position." The team called in a helicopter strike, killing three men and wounding three.
Gen. Abdul Baqir Murtzawi, deputy police chief of the province, said the Afghans were members of a local police team who were on their way to meet a unit of the American Special Forces for a joint patrol when the helicopters swept in. Before joining the police, the men were members of a local self-defense force called Arbakai, General Murtzawi said.
[…]
Israel/Palestine
9) Israeli Demolition Begins in East Jerusalem Project
Isabel Kershner, New York Times, January 9, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/world/middleeast/10mideast.html
Jerusalem – Israeli bulldozers demolished part of a landmark building in a predominantly Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem on Sunday to make way for a Jewish housing project, prompting condemnation from Palestinian officials and symbolic claims to the site from both sides.
Plans for development at the landmark, the Shepherd Hotel, have been in the works since the 1980s. But Jerusalem officials did not give the final go-ahead for the project until March, at the height of tensions between Israel and the Obama administration over construction in contested East Jerusalem.
[…] Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement that the demolition "is part of the political program of the Israeli government to pre-empt any solution on Jerusalem." He added: "Israel continues to change the landscape of Jerusalem, aiming to change its status and turn it into an exclusive Jewish city."
The initial plans, to build 20 residential units at the site, have long been a subject of international concern. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a statement calling the demolition a "disturbing development" that "undermines peace efforts."
"In particular, this move contradicts the logic of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the parties on the status of Jerusalem," she said.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said that "inserting settlers into Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem" undermined prospects for addressing the city’s status.
Israel annexed the eastern part of Jerusalem after capturing it from Jordan in the 1967 war and says it has sovereignty there. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future independent state.
The Shepherd Hotel is in the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood just north of the Old City, in an area that is coveted by both Arabs and Israelis. Although it is mostly populated by Palestinians, nationalist Jewish Israelis have moved into a number of houses there in recent years, evicting the Palestinian residents after Israeli courts ruled that the properties had belonged to Jews before the establishment of the state of Israel and the Jordanian takeover of East Jerusalem in 1948.
[…]
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