Just Foreign Policy News
April 26, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
*Action: Barbara Boxer: Ending the Endless War
California Senator Barbara Boxer has re-introduced former Senator Feingold’s bill requiring the President to establish a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan – a timetable with an end date. Senators Durbin, Harkin, Gillibrand, and Brown have already signed on as co-sponsors. A real deadline for US withdrawal would facilitate meaningful peace talks. More visible Senate criticism of the endless war can move the White House. Urge your Senator to co-sponsor.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/s186
An Anti-War Candidate Announces for President
If there is no anti-war Democratic primary for President, would you consider voting in the Republican one?
http://www.truth-out.org/anti-war-candidate-announces-president/1303823158
Talking Points on S. 186, Boxer’s Bill to Require End Date for Afghanistan War
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/893
Daniel Ellsberg: Bradley Manning Charges Should Be Dismissed
"…commander-in-chief has virtually given a directed verdict to his subsequent jurors…it’s clearly enough grounds for a dismissal of the charges, just as my trial was dismissed eventually for governmental misconduct."
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/26/daniel_ellsberg_bradley_manning_charges_should
Glenn Greenwald: Newly leaked documents show ongoing travesty of Guantanamo
Greenwald contrasts Guardian coverage ("files show innocent people incarcerated on flimsy pretexts") with NYT and WaPo coverage ("what we learned about the evildoers")
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/04/25/guantanamo/index.html
NYT: Could Ron Paul 2012 Outperform Ron Paul 2008?
NYT caucus blog suggests more Republican receptivity for Paul’s anti-war message.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/ron-paul-2012-could-outperform-ron-paul-2008/
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) More Americans disapprove of President Obama’s management of the war in Afghanistan than support it, the Washington Post reports. The disapproval mark is the highest on record in Post-ABC News polling. The poll released Monday showed that a majority of self-identified independents – 53 percent – disapprove of Obama’s handling of the war.
2) The disastrous war in Afghanistan threatens to upend Obama’s re-election plans, Katrina vanden Heuvel writes in the Washington Post. Antiwar sentiment is at the heart of Obama’s base – and also of his appeal to independent voters.
"Unless the people force this issue from the grass roots, sources in the Pentagon tell me we’re looking at a token 10,000-12,000 troop withdrawal [in July 2011] with a sketchy timeline – 2014 or even longer – for our continued military presence," said Matthew Hoh, director of the Afghanistan Study Group.
3) Pakistanis have launched a national nonviolent movement to stop the U.S. from using drone bombs on their country, writes Lisa Schirch on Huffington Post. Pakistan is a diverse country of different ethnic groups, religions, moderate and conservative political voices. A call for the U.S. to end its campaign of drone bombings on the country unites them all, even the Pakistani parliament.
Pakistanis ask, "Where is the democracy the U.S. preaches? By ignoring the call of the vast majority of Pakistanis to stop the U.S. drones, the U.S. makes it explicit that it only cares about its own interests, not the interests of Pakistanis."
4) Few believe drones are likely to tip the balance in the Libyan stalemate, the Los Angeles Times reports. "The effect in Libya is going to be largely psychological," predicted Anthony Cordesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "You’re not going to have enough of them to conduct a war of attrition against a dispersed force."
5) U.S. military intelligence assessing the threat of nearly 800 men held at Guantanamo in many cases used information from a small group of captives whose accounts now appear to be questionable, McClatchy reports. The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against some 255 men at Guantanamo – roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the testimony of some of the eight was later questioned by Guantanamo analysts themselves, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.
6) As lawmakers scour the budget for ways to reduce government spending, the U.S. continues to send millions of dollars to Brazil to subsidize the country’s cotton sector, the Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. payments are in return for Brazil’s agreement not to levy tariffs on U.S. goods in retaliation for US cotton subsidies that have been ruled illegal by the WTO. Meanwhile, USDA continues to pay subsidies to U.S. cotton farmers. In 2003, the USDA paid out $2.9 billion to cotton farmers. "It is the single stupidest public policy I have ever encountered," said Rep. Barney Frank. Reps. Kind and Frank have sought to kill these payments earlier this year, and now are renewing their fight as the 2012 budget battle heats up.
Kind, Frank and Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) tried to halt the payments to Brazil in February by proposing an amendment to a government spending bill. Their amendment to ban the payments was defeated 246 to 183 on Feb. 18. Frank blamed its defeat on lawmakers from large, southern, cotton-producing states. There are a lot of lawmakers now "with a great urging for cutting the deficit," he said, but not "when it comes to something that puts money into their constituents pockets."
Israel/Palestine
7) Montgomery has come to Nabi Saleh, writes Mark Perry in Foreign Policy. Over the last two years, nearly 15 percent of the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh has spent time in Israeli jails; half of those arrested were under 18 and the youngest was 11. But protests continue against an Israeli settlement that has "expropriated" the village’s spring.
"The international community has been asking for years where the Palestinian nonviolent movement is," New York journalist Joseph Dana says from his home in Jerusalem. "Well, here it is. And the Americans are nowhere to be found."
Afghanistan
8) The U.S. government said accounting at Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry is so lax that it isn’t possible to determine how big the Afghan National Police force is, the Wall Street Journal reports. The special inspector general, a watchdog agency charged with investigating corruption in Afghanistan, said the ministry "cannot determine the actual number of personnel" in the Afghan National Police. According to the audit, the current strength of the force may be under 112,000, or as high as 125,000.
Honduras
9) Drug cartels now control large parts of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, McClatchy reports. Gen. Douglas Fraser, chief of Southern Command told a Pentagon news briefing Central America "has probably become the deadliest zone in the world" outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Homicide rates in cities such as San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras are soaring, making them as deadly as Mogadishu or Kandahar. One former member of Honduras’ Council Against Drug Trafficking estimated 10 percent of members of the Honduran congress have links to drug traffickers. "We have evidence that about 42 percent of all cocaine flights that leave South America for the rest of the world go through Honduras," U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens said.
10) Crime groups in cahoots with venal army officers are looting military arsenals in Central America, McClatchy reports. The weapons run the gamut from assault rifles to anti-tank missiles, some of which the U.S. supplied. The slippage prompted the DIA to publish a report entitled, "Honduras: Military Weapons Fuel Black Arms Market," an October 2008 cable said. Pentagon investigators determined that six light anti-tank weapons found in Colombia "were part of a shipment of 50" sent to Honduras in 1992 under a U.S. Foreign Military Sales program.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Poll: More Americans disapprove of Obama’s management of Afghan war
Scott Wilson and Jon Cohen, Washington Post, Monday, April 25, 4:41 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/poll-more-americans-disapprove-of-obamas-management-of-afghan-war/2011/04/25/AFBjpnjE_story.html
More Americans disapprove of President Obama’s management of the war in Afghanistan than support it, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, a finding that reflects the public’s broader concern over the course of the nearly decade-old conflict.
Americans have given Obama wide leeway in escalating the conflict in Afghanistan, which as a presidential candidate he called "the war we have to win." That latitude is changing – and fairly quickly – as the longer-running of the two wars he inherited approaches the 10-year mark.
In the Post-ABC News survey released Monday, 49 percent of respondents said they disapprove of Obama’s management of the war and 44 percent voiced approval. The disapproval mark is the highest on record in Post-ABC News polling. Overall, the figures have essentially flipped since January, the last time the poll asked the question. In that survey, 49 percent approved of Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan war and 41 percent disapproved.
The change in public opinion comes at the start of the annual fighting season in Afghanistan, a period that U.S. military commanders have warned will probably be more intense than previous ones as the Taliban seeks to retake ground lost to U.S. forces over the past year.
[…] The steadily waning support for the war – and Obama’s stewardship of it – might have political implications as the president fights for reelection.
The poll released Monday showed that a majority of self-identified independents – 53 percent – disapprove of Obama’s handling of the war. Independents were an essential part of the coalition that elected him in 2008, and the White House has been seeking to win back those voters as 2012 nears.
The last time the Post-ABC News poll recorded such high dissatisfaction among independents over Obama’s management of the Afghanistan war was in November 2009, the month before he announced his new surge strategy. It is only the second time that a majority of independents have said they disapprove of his approach.
[…]
2) Why Afghanistan could upend Obama’s reelection strategy
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, Tuesday, April 26, 11:49 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-reelection-step-for-obama-get-out-of-afghanistan/2011/04/25/AFVIuQqE_story.html
The outlines of President Obama’s reelection strategy are becoming more distinct. He’ll bet that the faltering recovery has enough momentum to sell, particularly to college-educated suburban independents. He’ll find a way to cut a deal with Republicans on deficits that doesn’t completely derail the recovery.
[…] But in addition to the economy, the disastrous war in Afghanistan threatens to upend this game plan.
Afghanistan is the "good war" that has gone bad. Obama bought into the fantasies of Gen. David Petraeus and the new generation of counterinsurgency mavens, who argued that we could fend off the Taliban, hunt the remnants of al-Qaeda, and build an operating nation in Afghanistan, with a government that could provide minimum security for its people. The president added his own caution: we’d have a surge but begin to withdraw U.S. forces in July of this year.
But it all went bad. The Karzai government was more corrupt and more incompetent than the generals admitted. The Taliban proved more resourceful; the tribal relations more indecipherable. The new generation of counterinsurgency mavens proved no wiser than the Vietnam generation. Defense Secretary Robert Gates concluded that any future Pentagon secretary who advises a president to fight wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan "should have his head examined."
The White House started pointing to 2014 as the time when U.S. troops would depart, quietly planning to extend what is already America’s longest war. "Unless the people force this issue from the grass roots, sources in the Pentagon tell me we’re looking at a token 10,000-12,000 troop withdrawal [in July 2011] with a sketchy timeline – 2014 or even longer – for our continued military presence," said Matthew Hoh, a former Marine who resigned his Afghanistan post in protest and now serves as director of the Afghanistan Study Group.
Antiwar sentiment is at the heart of Obama’s base – and also of his appeal to independent voters. His 2008 candidacy was defined as that of the one leader who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning and who pledged to bring it to a close. Buoyed by his election and his commitment to draw down troops from Iraq, liberals largely gave Obama a pass on the Afghanistan surge, placated by his commitment to a time certain to begin getting troops out.
Antiwar sentiment didn’t disappear, however, it just went mainstream. As the Great Recession exposed the breadth of America’s problems and the war continued to waste lives and resources, support eroded steadily. A January Gallup poll reported that 72 percent of American voters want to "speed up" the withdrawal of troops from the 2014 date. Eighty-six percent of Democrats, 72 percent of independents and 61 percent of Republicans favored a more rapid withdrawal.
And liberal patience is exhausted. Sen. Barbara Boxer – joined, remarkably, by Sen. Richard Durbin, the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate and the closest personally to President Obama – has introduced a resolution demanding that the president lay out a plan for withdrawal with a "date certain" for the end. The Democratic National Committee, whose members are gearing up for the president’s reelection campaign, passed a resolution introduced by Rep. Barbara Lee that demands a "swift withdrawal" of troops and contractors, starting with a "significant and sizable reduction [of troops] no later than July 2011."
This argument is likely to explode as we approach the president’s "beginning of withdrawal" date of July 2011. The financial costs of the war – the $10 billion a month expended on it would be sufficient to erase the debilitating debts of all of the states combined this year – are increasingly indefensible. The human costs – with some 12,000 U.S. dead and wounded, hundreds of thousands of Afghan casualties, millions displaced – are mounting. The military is pushing the president to stay the course, to minimize any force reduction until the situation stabilizes.
[…] But clearly it is time for the president to declare victory and get out of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda has been reduced to remnants. We can’t and shouldn’t afford the human, moral or fiscal costs of continued occupation in Afghanistan, and the people who live there will have to decide what kind of nation they build, if any. We can support smart diplomacy to bring a political resolution to this civil war.
Defending Planned Parenthood, the EPA, Medicare and Social Security puts the administration on the side of the vast majority of Americans. The Tea Party Republican extremists are helping to reenergize the president’s base, but this president has said that "the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own." He is about to find out just how seriously his own supporters take that pledge.
3) U.S. Drones Mobilize Pakistani Nonviolent Movement
Lisa Schirch, Huffington Post, 04/25/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-schirch/us-drone-strikes-_b_853114.html
As a foreigner visiting Pakistan, this weekend’s protests in Peshawar against U.S. drones remind me of prior Pakistani calls for sovereignty and independence.
On April 23, 1930, British troops opened fire on peaceful Muslim protestors in Peshawar in a vigil to gain their independence from British colonial powers. Eighty years later, the struggle for self-determination and democracy continues and is now a national theme for a country besieged by external interests.
On April 23, 2011, Pakistani women and men from around the country launched a national nonviolent movement to stop the U.S. from using drone bombs on their country.
As an American visiting Pakistani colleagues working for peace, I am meeting with college students, media personalities, religious leaders, businessmen, construction workers, doctors, lawyers and NGOs. In every single conversation about the prospects for peace in Pakistan, two issues come up: the civilian casualties in U.S. drone strikes and the perceived double standard of justice for Raymond Davis who allegedly killed a number of Pakistanis and bought his freedom, denying justice to the families of the victims.
Pakistan is a diverse country of different ethnic groups, religions, moderate and conservative political voices. A call for the U.S. to end its campaign of drone bombings on the country unites them all, even the Pakistani parliament.
Pakistanis ask, "Where is the democracy the U.S. preaches? By ignoring the call of the vast majority of Pakistanis to stop the U.S. drones, the U.S. makes it explicit that it only cares about its own interests, not the interests of Pakistanis."
Then they note the drones are not even in the U.S. interest — for they destabilize the country. Most people feel caught between Taliban violence and American violence. For those working for peace, they say U.S. drones policy here just adds fuel to the fire.
The pages of Pakistani newspapers are also full of criticism of U.S. drones, offering full coverage of the Peshawar protests. The Editor of the International News in Islamabad writes "Every drone strike in which innocent lives are lost … deepens the well of resentment. The drone strikes play directly into the hands of the very extremists they are supposed to be targeting and are seen by a battered public as cruel aggression."
The editor concludes, "Americans [are] creating a giant storage battery of extremism." In "The Costs of Drone Strikes" written in 2009, I outline the many reasons both Americans and Pakistanis lose and suffer from U.S. drone bombings. Yet the Obama Administration has increased the use of drones in the last two years.
Imran Khan, former cricket player and respected political figure, is leading the protests against U.S. drones. If the drones do not stop in the next 30 days, Khan calls for a full-scale national people’s movement to blockade all ports and roads delivering supplies to U.S. forces heading to Afghanistan.
Moderate and progressive urban elites and rural, conservative tribal elders are joining his call to unite Pakistani civil society around their collective struggle for self-determination using their rich history of nonviolent protests.
Muslim Pathan leader Bacha Khan preceded Mahatma Gandhi in his nonviolent struggle against colonialism here in what is now Pakistan. His work for peace based on the Pukhtoon tribal culture and Islamic teachings about bravery, courage and respect continue to influence Pakistan society. Some here say this historic Muslim leader of nonviolent social movements may also be inspiring those using nonviolent protests in Libya, Bahrain and Egypt.
The values of civility and nonviolence have a long history here in Pakistan and people’s movements here are not a new phenomena. South Asia has a long tradition of nonviolent movements that mirrors those documented in "Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East."
The challenge to the West is clear. The U.S. cannot preach democracy and stability on the one hand but then deny the majority of voices here that say the U.S. drones themselves are destabilizing this country.
4) U.S. drones may provide psychological edge in Libya
The decision to unleash the unmanned Predators in Misurata delights rebels fighting to topple Moammar Kadafi. But few believe the aircraft will be the key to victory.
Ned Parker and Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-libya-drones-20110425,0,469094.story
Misurata and Benghazi, Libya – The first missile strike by an unmanned Predator against Moammar Kadafi’s forces underscores how the drones have become the go-to weapon for an Obama White House wary of being drawn deeper into another messy conflict. But few believe the remote-controlled aircraft are likely to tip the balance in the Libyan stalemate.
Anti-Kadafi rebels who have grumbled about the limited U.S. role in the international air war in Libya were buoyed by Saturday’s strike on a rocket launcher in the besieged port city of Misurata.
[…] However, only two patrols of armed Predators – with each drone capable of carrying a pair of Hellfire missiles – have been assigned to Libyan airspace. The limited deployment tends to mitigate the drone’s strengths, such as advanced targeting capabilities and an ability to hover over the battlefield.
"The effect in Libya is going to be largely psychological," predicted Anthony Cordesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "You’re not going to have enough of them to conduct a war of attrition against a dispersed force."
[…] In Pakistan, President Obama has stuck to a policy of drone attacks targeting alleged Al Qaeda operatives despite complaints from Pakistani officials, human rights groups and others about the scores of civilian deaths that ensue in that nation’s tribal zones.
[…] Predators, equipped with advanced sensors and live-video surveillance cameras, are capable of precision strikes in urban areas, hitting tanks or artillery pieces while limiting civilian casualties, analysts say. Still, critics say repeated civilian casualties in drone attacks in Pakistan undermine the argument that Predators are somehow safer for civilians than other military aircraft.
But from the Pentagon’s perspective, the remote operation provides perhaps the Predator’s biggest strength: It means no chance of losing pilots and a Mogadishu-like "Black Hawk Down" disaster on the streets of Misurata. Kadafi’s troops are known to possess a variety of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons that can down low-flying aircraft.
"Nothing will cause people’s support to fall faster than an urban warfare scenario," said Shashank Joshi, an analyst with London’s Royal United Services Institute.
[…] But experts cautioned that it was wrong to think of the robotic aircraft as capable of turning the tide of battle – either here in Misurata or in Libya as a whole. Despite their cachet, drones function more as a complement to other weapons systems.
"It would absolutely be a grave error to see the drones as some kind of magic bullet," Joshi said. "What is likely to turn the conflict in Misurata is the conduct of the forces of the regime and of the rebels on the ground, rather than anything that NATO can or cannot do."
[…]
5) WikiLeaks: Just 8 at Gitmo gave evidence against 255 others
Tom Lasseter and Carol Rosenberg, McClatchy Newspapers, April 26, 2011 11:06:29 AM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/04/25/112796/wikileaks-just-8-at-gitmo-gave.html
Washington – U.S. military intelligence assessing the threat of nearly 800 men held at Guantanamo in many cases used information from a small group of captives whose accounts now appear to be questionable, according to a McClatchy analysis of a trove of secret documents from the facility.
The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against some 255 men at Guantanamo – roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the testimony of some of the eight was later questioned by Guantanamo analysts themselves, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.
Concerns about the quality of the "facts" from the eight men goes to the heart of Guantanamo’s "mosaic" approach of piecing together detainees’ involvement with insurgent or terrorist groups that usually did not depend on one slam-dunk piece of evidence. Rather, intelligence analysts combined an array of details such as the items in detainees’ pants pockets at capture and whether they had confessed to interrogators – American or otherwise.
More than two-thirds of the men and boys at Guantanamo were not captured by U.S. forces. So analysts were often left to weave together the stories told by detainees, the context of where and how they were initially scooped up, the information passed on by interrogators at other U.S. detention sites and, crucially, the testimony of fellow detainees at Guantanamo.
[…] Among the other informants, who were used in the assessments to both make direct allegations against detainees and explain more general issues such as the relationship between various militant groups:
– A Syrian detainee known as Abdul Rahim Razak al Janko, whose own file said that "there are so many variations and deviations in his reporting, as a result of detainee trying to please his interrogators, that it is difficult to determine what is factual." He was quoted or cited in records for 20 detainees.
– Muhammad al Qahtani, a Saudi man whose interrogations reportedly included 20-hour sessions and being led around by a leash, appeared as a source in at least 31 cases. A Guantanamo analyst note about Qahtani acknowledged that "starting in winter 2002/2003, (Qahtani) began retracting statements," though it argued that based on corroborating information "it is believed that (his) initial admissions were the truth."
[…] – Ibn al Shaykh al Libi, a Libyan, told CIA de-briefers in 2004 that he had earlier exaggerated his status in al Qaida because he thought that’s what American interrogators wanted to hear. He also said that he fabricated connections between Iraq and al Qaida to avoid mistreatment or torture by Egyptian interrogators. Information from al Libi, thought to have been collected elsewhere, was cited in at least 38 of the Guantanamo files.
– Mohammed Hashim, an Afghan whose reporting was described in one analyst’s note as "of an undetermined reliability and is considered only partially truthful," showed up in assessments for 21 detainees.
– Statements from Ali Abdul Motalib Hassan, an Iraqi whose assessment said he "has admitted that he exaggerates in order to make himself appear more important" and who was seen as "unreliable," appeared in 33 detainee files.
– Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a Saudi-born Palestinian who’s known more widely as Abu Zubaydah, was cited in about 127 detainee files. His interrogations are reported to have included at least 83 instances of water boarding, and his attorney, Brent Mickum, recently told McClatchy that "he provided tremendous amounts of information that was worthless."
– Fawaz Naman Hamoud Abdullah Mahdi was used in only six cases. But given a 2004 Guantanamo assessment of the Yemeni, it seems surprising that the fruit of his interrogations would be used as evidence against anyone: His "severe psychological disorder and deteriorating attention span" meant "the reliability and accuracy of the information provided by (Mahdi) will forever remain questionable," according to the assessment.
[…] Any lingering doubts about the eight men and the quality of their statements were rarely listed when their information appeared in the case files of other detainees. Guantanamo officials were so pleased with Basardah’s work, for example, that his identifying a fellow detainee was used as an example in a guide to "threat indicators."
But in a 2009 opinion ordering the Pentagon to release Guantanamo detainee Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina pointed out that Basardah’s allegations about Hatim were collected several years after Guantanamo interrogators knew there were problems.
While the government maintained that Basardah provided interrogators with "accurate, reliable information," Urbina said that Basardah had been flagged as early as May 2002 by a Guantanamo interrogator who did not recommend using him for further intelligence gathering "due in part to mental and emotional problems (and) limited knowledgeability."
[…] For Human Rights Watch senior counterterror counsel Andrea Prasow, who earlier in her career defended several Guantanamo captives, the military’s heavy reliance on such prison camp snitches vindicates the role of federal judges in analyzing the Pentagon’s patchwork of cases. "But for habeas," she said Monday, "we’d never have known that Basardah was a liar."
[…]
6) In Budget Fight, Brazil Subsidies Divide Lawmakers
Bill Tomson, Wall Street Journal, April 25, 2011, 12:31 P.M. ET
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704132204576284921632237458.html
Washington – As lawmakers scour the budget for ways to reduce government spending, the U.S. continues to send millions of dollars to Brazil to subsidize the country’s cotton sector, payments that aren’t touched in the latest round of budget-cutting proposals.
The U.S. payments to Brazil, made in return for the country’s agreement not to levy tariffs on U.S. goods, appears to be safe from budget cutters in Congress despite renewed efforts by some lawmakers this year to stop it. The U.S. is paying $12.275 million monthly to Brazil, according to the agreement between the two countries. Rep. Ron Kind (D., Wis.) is spearheading the effort in Congress to stop the payments.
Brazil took the U.S. to international trade court in 2003 over its cotton-subsidy programs, claiming the U.S. unfairly bolstered its cotton exports and put Brazilian shippers at a disadvantage. Brazil won and even defeated a U.S. appeal by 2005, but the legal wranglings continued over whether the U.S. was complying with the World Trade Organization ruling and abolishing its cotton-subsidy programs.
In June 2010, the U.S. struck a deal with Brazil to make monthly payments of $12.275 million on top of two one-time payments of $30 million and $4.3 million. Total U.S. payments to Brazil should reach $157 million by the end of this month.
Brazil, under the agreement, is responsible for making sure the money is spent only on improving the country’s cotton sector.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture continues to pay subsidies to U.S. cotton farmers. In 2003, the year Brazil requested a WTO dispute panel, the USDA paid out $2.9 billion to cotton farmers, according to government data. The yearly amount has varied sharply though, reaching $4.2 billion in 2005 and just $872 million last year.
"It is the single stupidest public policy I have ever encountered," said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. Mr. Kind said this is a bad example for how the U.S. deals with trade disputes.
A USDA spokesman defended the deal, saying it prevented Brazil from imposing "hundreds of millions of dollars in countermeasures against U.S. trade, including an unprecedented targeting of our intellectual property rights."
[…] Messrs. Kind and Frank have sought to kill these payments earlier this year, and now are renewing their fight as the 2012 budget battle heats up. The House approved a 2012 budget that would slash government spending by $5.8 trillion over 10 years, including significant cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.
The U.S. payments are to convince Brazil not to impose billions of dollars of retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products, but it’s also to protect the U.S. government’s ability to subsidize cotton farmers. Three of the four U.S. subsidy programs that Brazil initially took the U.S. to court over in 2003 are still running under the oversight of the USDA.
[…] Mr. Kind, together with the support of Mr. Frank and Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) tried and failed to halt the payments to Brazil in February by proposing an amendment to a government spending bill. Their amendment to ban the payments was defeated 246 to 183 on Feb. 18.
[…] Mr. Frank blamed its defeat on lawmakers from large, southern, cotton-producing states. There are a lot of lawmakers now "with a great urging for cutting the deficit," he said, but not "when it comes to something that puts money into their constituents pockets."
[…]
Israel/Palestine
7) When Montgomery comes to Nabi Saleh
Mark Perry, Foreign Policy, Tuesday, April 26, 2011 – 2:52 PM
http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/04/26/when_montgomery_comes_to_nabi_saleh
On March 24, the Israeli government arrested Bassem Tamimi, a 44-year-old resident of the small Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, which is just west of Ramallah. Tamimi was arrested for leading a group of his neighbors in protest marches on a settlement that had "expropriated" the village’s spring — the symbolic center of Nabi Saleh’s life.
Tamimi was brought before the Ofer military court and charged with "incitement, organizing unpermitted marches, disobeying the duty to report to questioning" and "obstruction of justice" — for giving young Palestinians advice on how to act under Israeli police interrogation. He was remanded to an Israeli military prison to await a hearing and a trial. The detention of Tamimi is not a formality: under Israeli military decree 101 he is being charged with attempting "verbally or otherwise, to influence public opinion in the Area in a way that may disturb the public peace or public order." As in Syria, this is an "emergency decree" disguised as protecting public security. It carries a sentence of 10 years.
The arrest of Tamimi marked only the most recent escalation in Israel’s campaign to suffocate the Nabi Saleh movement: in the two months prior to his arrest, Israeli officials detained more than 18 Nabi Saleh youths; over the last two years, nearly 15 percent of Nabi Saleh’s population has spent time in Israeli jails; half of those arrested have been under the age of 18 and the youngest of them was 11. But what is extraordinary about the Nabi Saleh campaign is its effectiveness. The protestors are trained in non-violent tactics. "Our strategic choice of a popular struggle — as a means to fight the occupation taking over our lands, lives, and future — is a declaration that we do not harm human lives," Tamimi has said. "The very essence of our activity opposes killing."
Tamimi’s arrest has not stopped the movement. On the morning of April 8, about 80 villagers marched from Nabi Saleh’s main street towards the settlement. As they crossed into some nearby fields, they were attacked by IDF soldiers with teargas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades. The villagers fled, but then reorganized themselves, defiantly linking arms in front of the soldiers. Again, the IDF responded harshly and, by that evening, had arrested six villagers. But these are small incidents in a continuing battle. The protests go on day after day, week after week — and have over the course of the last four years.
Nabi Saleh does not stand alone. The non-violent protests actually began eight years ago in small communities near Israel’s security wall, then took root in the villages of Mas’ha and Budrus; the protests have now spread to towns and villages across the West Bank, encompassing mass rural movements from Hebron in the south to Nablus in the north. The protests have involved dozens to hundreds, and on rare occasions, thousands of villagers. But pride of place for this widespread non-violent resistance movement belongs to Bil’in, a village that (like Nabi Saleh) has seen much of its land taken over by a settlement. The leader of the Bil’in protests is Abdallah Abu Rahmah, the head of Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against the Wall. Like Tamimi, Abu Rahmah has trained his young activists in the principles of non-violence, sparking movable protests that the IDF has found impossible to suppress.
Abu Rahmah, a high school teacher at the Latin Patriarch School in Ramallah, began organizing Bil’in’s protests in 2004, even as the violence of the Second Intifada was beginning to wane. Every Friday after prayers, Abu Rahmah would lead a group of Bil’in residents on a protest march towards a local settlement — and every Friday his march would be intercepted by the IDF.
In one demonstration, an IDF sniper used a .22 caliber rifle to disburse the protesters, killing a Palestinian boy. Twenty-one unarmed demonstrators, among them five children, have been killed in non-violent West Bank demonstrations since the beginnings of the movement. In the village of Nil’in in 2008, American activist Tristan Anderson was paralyzed after an IDF soldier fired a high velocity tear gas canister at his head from a distance of 15 meters. In December of 2009, IDF soldiers raided Abu Rahmah’s home, arrested him for incitement, and sentenced him to 12 months in prison. At the end of his sentence, the IDF asked his sentence to be extended for another four months, describing Abu Rahmah as "dangerous." The court agreed.
Abu Rahmah has become a symbol of the protests. While in prison, he smuggled letters to his supporters, including one — written this last February — that has become a kind of "Letter from Birmingham Jail" of the movement. "Ofer is an Israeli military base inside the occupied territories that serves as a prison and military court," he wrote. "The prison is a collection of tents enclosed by razor wire and an electrical fence, each unit containing four tents, 22 prisoners per tent. Now, in winter, wind and rain comes through the cracks in the tent and we don’t have sufficient blankets, clothes, and other basic necessities. Food is a critical issue here in Ofer, there’s not enough. We survive by buying ingredients from the prison canteen that we prepare for our tent. We have one small hot plate, and this is also our only source of warmth."
One month after penning this letter, Abu Rahmah was released, but it’s only a matter of time before he’s arrested again — and shut inside one of the half-dozen Israeli military prisons and administrative facilities that dot the West Bank. Israeli tactics, the mass arrests, and the use of live fire have been condemned by a long list of human rights organization. But not by the United States.
Just how much do the Bil’in-Nabi Saleh protests worry Israel? One widely circulated article from the popular Israeli political daily Yediot Ahronot described Naji Tamimi, who helped his cousin Bassem organize the Nabi Saleh movement, as "a pied piper" who "fans the flames of violence." (Despite the fact that not one Israeli has died as a result of the protests.) The article went further: "Even though it hasn’t been proven, it seems that sources connected to the Palestinian Authority are directing the activities and that the funds paid out to the youths is coming from donations from organizations registered abroad." Not proven — because it’s not true. In fact, while Fateh and Hamas officials monitor the protests (PA officials have come to Nabi Saleh — before scuttling back to their offices in Ramallah), they have been careful not to interfere in them. They view the protests as a credible and powerful movement that is better left alone. Hamas leaders agree. "We wish them well. We hope they succeed. We support them. We are staying away," a senior Hamas official says.
A group of international activists have been helping the Nabi Saleh protests. Jonathan Pollak, a 29-year-old native of Tel Aviv, has found himself at the center of the protests — and has written about them extensively. "I grew up in a progressive home," he says, "but I don’t think that anyone in my family could be described as a radical. I came to Nabi Saleh and realized I had to help. What’s happening here is just wrong." Joseph Dana, a New York native and journalist, works alongside Pollak. He came to Israel to find his Jewish identity. "I haven’t found it," he says. "What I found instead was an army that arrests children."
Pollak, Dana, and other international activists are working to bring attention to the Nabi Saleh movement and have escorted diplomats from Europe through the village. A few low-level American diplomats from Jerusalem have come to Nabi Saleh, but no senior American officials have visited. "The international community has been asking for years where the Palestinian nonviolent movement is," Joseph Dana says from his home in Jerusalem. "Well, here it is. And the Americans are nowhere to be found."
[…] In Cairo, in June of 2009, President Obama linked the Palestinian quest for freedom to the American civil rights movement. "Palestinians must abandon violence," he said. "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed." He was right. So why is it that now — when finally, Montgomery has come to Nabi Saleh — he chooses to remain silent?
Afghanistan
8) Kabul’s Police Tab Fails a U.S. Audit
Nathan Hodge, Wall Street Journal, April 26, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703856704576285380546943792.html
Washington – The U.S. government said accounting at Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry is so lax that it isn’t possible to determine how big the Afghan National Police force is or whether its officers are being properly paid.
The government’s audit, released Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, highlights a major weakness in the way the U.S. and its allies measure progress in the war effort. The coalition often cites growth in the police force as evidence that the Afghan government is increasingly able to handle security and that international troops will soon be able to begin pulling out of the country.
In addition, the audit adds fuel to the Afghan public perception that the force is riddled with corruption and incompetence, and that even the Taliban’s brutal justice system might be preferable.
In a statement, Herbert Richardson, the acting inspector general, wrote that "significant risks of fraud, waste, and abuse of donors’ funds will continue unless controls are improved" by the Afghan government.
The special inspector general, a watchdog agency charged with investigating corruption in Afghanistan, said the ministry "cannot determine the actual number of personnel" in the Afghan National Police because of poor record-keeping and overlapping databases.
[…] Current plans call for the Afghan government to build up the national police to 134,000 officers by October, from a force that numbered around 81,500 in mid-2009.
According to the audit, the current strength of the force may be under 112,000, or as high as 125,000, because the ministry’s personnel records "are incomplete, unverified and unreconciled."
Afghanistan’s police and army are funded in large part by international donors.
The inspector general said the U.S. and other contributors have given about $1.5 billion to a trust fund administered by the United Nations Development Program for police salaries.
Payroll records are also an issue. Among other things, the audit found that the Interior Ministry’s payroll system was particularly vulnerable to "ghost employees"-nonexistent or no-show workers that bolster payrolls, creating potential for supervisors to skim funds. According to the report, some unit commanders are allowed to pick up payroll funds directly from a commercial or state bank to disburse to individual police employees, in cash.
As of last fall, the audit said, some 21% of Afghan National Police employees were still paid in cash.
That method of payment, the audit said, "is subject to the greatest risk of abuse, including skimming of salaries and payments to ghost employees."
[…]
Honduras
9) Drug gangs muscle into new territory: Central America
Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers, Thursday, Apr. 21, 2011
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/04/21/3570480/drug-gangs-muscle-into-new-territory.html
San Pedro Sula, Honduras – Even by the brazen standards of cocaine cowboys, what happened a few months ago at an air force base here set new levels for audacity: Drug traffickers snuck onto the heavily guarded base and retrieved a confiscated plane.
Confederates at the airbase had already fueled and warmed up the motors of the Beechcraft Super King Air 200, a workhorse of the cocaine trade. Within days, it would be again hauling dope from South America.
The stunt was a black eye for the Honduran military, and just one of many signs that parts of Central America have fallen into the maw of international organized crime, threatening decades of U.S. efforts to stanch the tidal wave of drugs headed to American cities and towns.
Washington has spent billions of dollars to help push drug cartels out of Colombia, and to confront them in Mexico. Now they’ve muscled their way into Central America, opening a new chapter in the drug war that almost certainly will exact further cost on U.S. taxpayers as American authorities confront drug gangs on a new frontier.
The extent of the infiltration is breathtaking. Drug cartels now control large parts of the countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America. They’ve bought off politicians and police, moved cocaine processing laboratories up from the Andes, and are obtaining rockets and other heavy armament that make them more than a match for Central America’s weak militaries.
Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser, chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, told a March 30 Pentagon news briefing that Central America "has probably become the deadliest zone in the world" outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Homicide rates in cities such as San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras are soaring, making them as deadly as Mogadishu, Somalia, or the Taliban home base of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The political influence of the drug gangs is burgeoning. One former member of Honduras’ Council Against Drug Trafficking estimated that fully 10 percent of members of the Honduran congress have links to drug traffickers.
[…] By many accounts, the tide of cocaine through the region has become a sea. "We have evidence that about 42 percent of all cocaine flights that leave South America for the rest of the world go through Honduras. That’s a pretty staggering number," U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens said.
[…]
10) Drug gangs help themselves to Central American military arsenals
Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers, April 26, 2011 11:07:23 AM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/04/21/112616/drug-gangs-help-themselves-to.html
Washington – Crime groups in cahoots with venal army officers are looting military arsenals in Central America, giving them powerful weapons that allow them to outgun police and challenge the region’s regular armies.
The weapons run the gamut from assault rifles to anti-tank missiles, some of which the U.S. supplied during regional conflicts more than two decades ago. The slippage from military armories occurs regularly.
The feared Mexican organized crime group known as Los Zetas has stolen weapons from military depots in Guatemala three times in recent years, Guatemalan Deputy Security Minister Mario Castaneda told an anti-narcotics conference in early April in Cancun, Mexico.
In February, U.S. prosecutors unsealed a five-count indictment against a retired army captain from El Salvador for allegedly selling or offering C-4 plastic explosives, assault rifles, grenades and blasting caps to undercover agents.
U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to McClatchy show that American envoys have repeatedly voiced concern over lax controls on military weapons depots in Guatemala and Honduras.
One cable from June 2009 carries a simple message line: "Rogue elements of Guatemalan military selling weapons to narcos."
The cable was sent after a narcotics raid on a warehouse south of Guatemala City on April 24, 2009, when agents clashed with "a number of heavily armed Zetas," leaving five agents dead. Inside the warehouse, the unit found 11 machine guns, a light antitank weapon, 563 rocket-propelled grenades, 32 hand grenades, eight landmines and abundant ammunition in crates with the seal of a Guatemalan military industrial facility.
U.S. defense analysts determined "with a high degree of confidence that many of these weapons and munitions came from Guatemalan military stocks," the cable said. "The involvement of Guatemalan military officers in the sale of weapons to narco-traffickers raises serious concerns about the Guatemalan military’s ability to secure its arms and ammunition," it added.
Moreover, it puts police tasked with confronting the cartels at a sharp disadvantage, the cable said, because they "now have to go up against weapons from Guatemala’s own military."
Further piquing U.S. officials, Washington furnished some of the munitions. That turned out to be the case in Honduras, where U.S.-supplied grenades and light anti-tank weapons turned up as far away as Ciudad Juarez, the narco-infested Mexican city on the border with Texas, and on Colombia’s San Andres Island, an entry point for weapons going to drug-trafficking guerrillas.
The slippage prompted the Defense Intelligence Agency to publish a report entitled, "Honduras: Military Weapons Fuel Black Arms Market," an October 2008 cable said. It noted that the Pentagon investigators determined from lot and serial numbers that six light anti-tank weapons found in Colombia "were part of a shipment of 50" sent to Honduras in 1992 under a U.S. Foreign Military Sales program.
[…]
–
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