Just Foreign Policy News
July 28, 2010
Roll Call on the War Supplemental
308-114; among Democrats, 148-102. 141 votes were needed to block a 2/3 majority (the vote was held under "suspension" rules.)
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll474.xml
Steve Niva: Olympia Food Co-op Boycotts Israeli Goods
Steve Niva, who teaches Middle East studies at Evergreen, argues that critics of Olympia Food Co-op’s decision to some boycott Israeli goods should explain what their alternative strategy is for ending the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinians.
http://counterpunch.org/niva07262010.html
South of the Border, scheduled screenings:
http://southoftheborderdoc.com/in-theatres/
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The House agreed on Tuesday to provide $37 billion to continue financing America’s two wars, but the vote showed deepening divisions among Democrats over the course of the conflict in Afghanistan, the New York Times reports. 148 Democrats and 160 Republicans backed the war spending, but 102 Democrats joined 12 Republicans in opposing the measure. Some of the Democratic opposition stemmed from the decision by party leaders to strip from the bill money that had been included in the original House version to help address the weak economy at home, including funds to help preserve teachers’ jobs. But some of those voting against it said they were influenced by the leaked documents. "I think the White House continues to underestimate the depth of antiwar sentiment here," said Representative Jim McGovern. At a confirmation hearing for Gen. Mattis to lead Central Command, Senator Reed asked General Mattis whether he agreed the US should use a July 2011 deadline for the start of withdrawals to begin moving toward a more limited strategy of hunting down insurgents without trying to rebuild Afghanistan. General Mattis quickly agreed. "I think that is the approach, Senator," he said.
2) An archive of military documents made public Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal, the New York Times reports. The documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the US is trying to defeat.
3) A cache of secret US military files reveals how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, the Guardian reports. The logs detail the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces. The logs reveal 144 such incidents. Some of these casualties come from air strikes, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists. Bloody errors at civilians’ expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack. Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what’s been a consistent trend by US and NATO forces: the concealment of civilian casualties."
4) The Wikileaks documents increase political pressure on the war policy by highlighting contradictions between the official assumptions of the strategy and the realities shown in the documents – especially in regard to Pakistan’s role in the war, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service. The issue of Pakistani "double-dealing" on Afghanistan is one of the Obama administration’s greatest political vulnerabilities, because it is bears on a point of particular political sensitivity among the political and national security elite who are worried about whether there is any hope for success for the war strategy. Implicitly admitting its political vulnerability on the issue, the White House issued a compilation of statements by senior administration officials over the last 18 months aimed at showing that they have been tough with Pakistan on Afghanistan. But none of the statements quoted in the compilation admitted the reality that Pakistan’s policy of supporting the Taliban insurgency has long been firmly fixed and is not going to change. Admitting that Pakistan’s fundamental interests in Afghanistan conflict with U.S. war strategy would be a serious – and possibly, fatal – blow to the credibility of the Obama administration’s strategy of using force to "reverse the momentum" of the Taliban.
5) House leaders rushed the vote on war funding out of fear that the Wikileaks disclosures could stoke Democratic opposition to the measure, the New York Times reports. Obama must figure out a way to convince Congress and the American people that his war strategy remains on track and is seeing fruit, or move more quickly to a far more limited US presence, the Times says.
6) Further Wikileaks disclosures reveal more evidence of attempts by coalition commanders to cover up civilian casualties in the conflict, the Guardian reports. The war logs show how a group of US marines who went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad in 2007 recorded false information about the incident, in which they killed 19 unarmed civilians and wounded a further 50. In another case that year, the logs detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000lb bombs on a compound where they believed a "high-value individual" was hiding, after "ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area". A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died. Amnesty International called on NATO "to provide a clear, unified system of accounting for civilian casualties in Afghanistan."
Israel/Palestine
7) The Israeli government is refusing to pay the medical bills of Emily Henochowicz, an American art student who lost an eye after being shot in the face with a tear-gas canister at a protest in the West Bank, the New York Times reports. In defense of its policy, the Israeli government said it had also refused to pay the medical bills of American Tristan Anderson – also shot in the head with a tear gas canister. In a letter to the Defense Ministry, Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard wrote, "It is insolent and preposterous to expect someone who was shot by the security forces, whether unintentionally, negligently or with criminal intention, to fund her own medical treatment."
Afghanistan
8) Among the Wikileaks documents is evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan is paying local media outlets to run friendly stories, Yahoo News reports. Several reports show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the US. Radio Ghaznawiyaan was established and funded by USAID, but USAID has described it as a success story for local independent journalism. Listeners may be surprised to learn that it is an outlet for paid U.S. "PSYOP radio content." A 2008 message says that the news director of the Wakht News Agency and president of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association "offered to include PRT [US] news articles and photos on his news service."
Iran
9) Writing in Foreign Policy, Marc Lynch notes with concern the Wall Street Journal’s claim that the Wikileaks documents "appear to give new evidence of direct contacts between Iranian officials and the Taliban’s and al Qaeda’s senior leadership." Much of what has been found about Iran’s role in Afghanistan is already generally known, while other information is of dubious provenance. New details add to the case for taking Iran into account more effectively when designing Afghanistan policy. But they don’t add up to some kind of smoking gun demonstrating an Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda.
10) 21 members of the new "Tea Party Caucus" have now explicitly endorsed Israel’s use of military force against Iran, Foreign Policy reports. They cosponsored a new resolution last week that expresses their support for Israel "to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force."
Honduras
11) The Committee to Protect Journalists says the Honduran government’s failure to investigate the killings of seven journalists this year has fostered "a climate of lawlessness that is allowing criminals to kill journalists with impunity," the New York Times reports. Human rights violations – directed mostly against the coup’s opponents, human rights defenders and activists – continue, according to a report last month by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Colombia
12) The Fellowship of Reconciliation alleges that Colombian military units implicated in cases of extrajudicial killings known as "false positives" received help from the U.S. government, in spite of a law which prohibits such assistance, according to Colombia Reports.
13) The State Department reversed its decision to deny a visa to a leading Colombian journalist whose reporting has been highly critical of the country’s U.S.-allied president, AP reports. A U.S. consular officer told Hollman Morris last month he was ruled permanently eligible for a visa under the "terrorist activities" clause of the USA Patriot Act. Morris credited protests from human rights groups, journalists, and Members of Congress for the reversal.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Democrats Split as House Backs War Funds
Elisabeth Bumiller and Carl Hulse, New York Times, July 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/world/28prexy.html
Washington – The House of Representatives agreed on Tuesday to provide $37 billion to continue financing America’s two wars, but the vote showed deepening divisions and anxiety among Democrats over the course of the nearly nine-year-old conflict in Afghanistan.
The 308-to-114 vote, with strong Republican support, came after the leak of an archive of classified battlefield reports from Afghanistan that fueled new debate over the course of the war and whether President Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy could work.
[…] In the House vote, 148 Democrats and 160 Republicans backed the war spending, but 102 Democrats joined 12 Republicans in opposing the measure. Last year, 32 Democrats opposed a similar midyear spending bill. Among those voting against the bill on Tuesday was Representative David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the panel responsible for the measure.
Some of the Democratic opposition stemmed from the decision by party leaders to strip from the bill money that had been included in the original House version to help address the weak economy at home, including funds to help preserve teachers’ jobs. But some of those voting against it said they were influenced by the leaked documents, which highlight the American military’s struggles in Afghanistan and support claims that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence service were helping the Taliban.
"All of the puzzle has been put together and it is not a pretty picture," said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Things are really ugly over there. I think the White House continues to underestimate the depth of antiwar sentiment here."
On another part of Capitol Hill, at a confirmation hearing for Gen. James N. Mattis to lead the military’s Central Command and oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee pressed General Mattis about the course of the war.
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, pointedly asked General Mattis whether he agreed that a July 2011 deadline for the start of American withdrawals from Afghanistan would mean shifting from the current troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy to an "increasingly important emphasis" on counterterrorism. In other words, should not the United States use the date to begin moving toward a more limited strategy of hunting down insurgents without trying to rebuild Afghanistan? General Mattis quickly agreed. "I think that is the approach, Senator," he said.
[…]
2) View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan
C. J. Chivers, Carlotta Gall, Andrew W. Lehren, Mark Mazzetti, Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt, Jacob Harris and Alan McLean, New York Times, July 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
[…] The documents – some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 – illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.
As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.
[…] The reports – usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives – shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
– The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
– Secret commando units like Task Force 373 – a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives – work from a "capture/kill list" of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
– The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.
– The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements – attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.
[…]
3) Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation
– Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops
– Covert unit hunts leaders for ‘kill or capture’
– Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato
Nick Davies and David Leigh, Guardian, Sunday 25 July 2010 22.03 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-military-leaks
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
[…] The war logs also detail:
– How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.
– How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
– How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
– How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
[…] The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.
Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.
At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.
Bloody errors at civilians’ expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.
[…] Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what’s been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I’ve investigated in recent months where this is still not happening. Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians."
[…]
4) Leaked Reports Make Afghan War Policy More Vulnerable
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service, July 26
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52285
Washington – The 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks, and reported Monday by the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, offer no major revelations that are entirely new, as did the Pentagon Papers to which they are inevitably being compared.
But they increase the political pressure on a war policy that has already suffered a precipitous loss of credibility this year by highlighting contradictions between the official assumptions of the strategy and the realities shown in the documents – especially in regard to Pakistan’s role in the war.
Unlike the Pentagon Papers, which chronicle the policymaking process leading up to and during the Vietnam War, the WikiLeaks documents chronicle thousands of local incidents and situations encountered by U.S. and other NATO troops that illustrate chronic problems for the U.S.-NATO effort.
Among the themes that are documented, sometimes dramatically but often through bland military reports, are the seemingly casual killing of civilians away from combat situations, night raids by special forces that are often based on bad intelligence, the absence of legal constraints on the abuses of Afghan police, and the deeply rooted character of corruption among Afghan officials.
The most politically salient issue highlighted by the new documents, however, is Pakistan’s political and material support for the Taliban insurgency, despite its ostensible support for U.S. policy in Afghanistan.
The documents include many intelligence reports about Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the director of the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, in the late 1980s, continuing to work with the Taliban commanders loyal to Mullah Omar as well as the Jalaluddin Haaqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar insurgent networks.
Some of the reports obviously reflect the anti-Pakistan bias of the Afghan intelligence service when it was under former Northern Alliance intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh. Nevertheless, the overall impression they convey of Pakistani support for the Taliban is credible to the news media, because they confirm numerous press reports over the past few years.
The New York Times led its coverage of the documents with its report on the Pakistani-Taliban issue. The story said the documents reflect "deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan’s military spy service has for years guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than 1 billion dollars a year from Washington for its help combating the militants."
The issue of Pakistani "double-dealing" on Afghanistan is one of the Barack Obama administration’s greatest political vulnerabilities, because it is bears on a point of particular political sensitivity among the political and national security elite who are worried about whether there is any hope for success for the war strategy, even with Gen. David Petraeus in command.
One Democratic opponent of the war policy was quick to take advantage of the leaked documents’ focus on Pakistan’s support for the Taliban. In a statement issued Monday, Sen. Russ Feingold, Democratic member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the documents "highlight a fundamental strategic problem, which is that elements of the Pakistani security services have been complicit in the insurgency".
In combination with "competing agendas within the Afghan security forces", Feingold argued, that problem precludes any "military solution in Afghanistan".
[…] Implicitly admitting its political vulnerability on the issue, on Sunday, the White House issued a compilation of statements by senior administration officials over the last 18 months aimed at showing that they have been tough with Pakistan on Afghanistan.
But none of the statements quoted in the compilation admitted the reality that Pakistan’s policy of supporting the Taliban insurgency has long been firmly fixed and is not going to change.
[…] Admitting that Pakistan’s fundamental interests in Afghanistan conflict with U.S. war strategy would be a serious – and possibly, fatal – blow to the credibility of the Obama administration’s strategy of using force to "reverse the momentum" of the Taliban.
To the extent that this contradiction and others are highlighted in the coming weeks as the news media comb through the mountains of new documents, it could accelerate the process by which political support for the Afghanistan War among the foreign policy and political elite continues to diminish.
[…]
5) Leaks Add To Pressure On White House Over Strategy
Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, New York Times, July 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/world/asia/27wikileaks.html
Washington – The White House sought to reassert control over the public debate on the Afghanistan war on Monday as political reaction to the disclosure of a six-year archive of classified military documents increased pressure on President Obama to defend his war strategy.
On Capitol Hill, a leading Senate Democrat said the documents, with their detailed account of a war faring even more poorly than two administrations had portrayed, would intensify Congressional scrutiny of Mr. Obama’s policy. "Those policies are at a critical stage, and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent," said Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and has been an influential supporter of the war.
The disclosures landed at a crucial moment. Because of difficulties on the ground and mounting casualties in the war, the debate over the American presence in Afghanistan has begun earlier than expected. Inside the administration, more officials are privately questioning the policy.
In Congress, House leaders were rushing to hold a vote on a critical war-financing bill as early as Tuesday, fearing that the disclosures could stoke Democratic opposition to the measure. A Senate panel is also set to hold a hearing on Tuesday on Mr. Obama’s choice to head the military’s Central Command, Gen. James N. Mattis, who would oversee operations in Afghanistan.
Administration officials acknowledged that the documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, will make it harder for Mr. Obama as he tries to hang on to public and Congressional support until the end of the year, when he has scheduled a review of the war effort. "We don’t know how to react," one frustrated administration official said on Monday. "This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood."
Mr. Obama is facing a tough choice: he must either figure out a way to convince Congress and the American people that his war strategy remains on track and is seeing fruit, or move more quickly to a far more limited American presence.
[…]
6) Afghanistan war logs: tensions increase after revelation of more leaked files
Coalition commanders hid civilian deaths, war logs reveal
David Leigh and Matthew Taylor, The Guardian, Tuesday 27 July 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/27/afghanistan-war-logs-tensions-strained
Tensions between the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan were further strained today after the leak of thousands of military documents about the Afghan war. As members of the US Congress raised questions about Pakistan’s alleged support for the Taliban, officials in Islamabad and Kabul also traded angry accusations on the same issue.
Further disclosures reveal more evidence of attempts by coalition commanders to cover up civilian casualties in the conflict. The details emerge from more than 90,000 secret US military files, covering six years of the war, which caused a worldwide uproar when they were leaked yesterday.
The war logs show how a group of US marines who went on a shooting rampage after coming under attack near Jalalabad in 2007 recorded false information about the incident, in which they killed 19 unarmed civilians and wounded a further 50.
In another case that year, the logs detail how US special forces dropped six 2,000lb bombs on a compound where they believed a "high-value individual" was hiding, after "ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area". A senior US commander reported that 150 Taliban had been killed. Locals, however, reported that up to 300 civilians had died.
[…] Four days after it was first approached by the Guardian, the British Ministry of Defence said it was still unable to give an account of two questionable clusters of civilian shootings by British troops detailed in the American logs.
They were alleged to have taken place in Kabul in a month in 2007 when a detachment of the Coldstream Guards was patrolling, and in the southern province of Helmand during a six-month tour of duty by Royal Marine commandos at the end of 2008. The MoD said: "We are currently examining our records to establish the facts in the alleged civilian casualty incidents raised."
[…] Amnesty International called for reforms to the recording of civilian casualties after a row broke out over an incident in which the Afghan government says 45 villagers were killed in a rocket attack. The coalition disputes that it was responsible. Amnesty called on Nato "to provide a clear, unified system of accounting for civilian casualties in Afghanistan".
[…]
Israel/Palestine
7) Hurt at Protest In West Bank, U.S. Student Fights Fees
Student Injury at Protest Leads to Battle in Israel
Isabel Kershner, New York Times, July 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/world/middleeast/28israel.html
Jerusalem – A macabre legal wrangle is under way over who should pay the hospital bill for an American art student who lost an eye after being struck by a tear-gas canister fired by an Israeli border police officer at a Palestinian-led protest in the West Bank.
The student, Emily Henochowicz, 21, was injured on May 31 after she joined Palestinian and foreign activists protesting that morning’s deadly raid by Israeli naval commandos on a Turkish boat trying to breach the blockade of Gaza. Israeli security forces fired tear gas to disperse the demonstration after a few Palestinian youths threw rocks.
Witnesses at the protest, by the Qalandiya checkpoint near Ramallah, said that a border police officer had fired the tear-gas directly at the demonstrators, rather than into the air in line with regulations. The Israeli police have begun a criminal investigation.
But the lawyer representing Ms. Henochowicz, Michael Sfard, recently received a letter from the Israeli Ministry of Defense rejecting any demand for compensation or payment of hospital costs. The reason, the ministry stated, was that the protest was violent and that the tear-gas canister was not fired directly but had ricocheted off a concrete barricade.
Ms. Henochowicz, who is Jewish and is a student at the Cooper Union in New York, arrived in Israel in February for what was supposed to be a six-month student exchange. Her father was born in Israel to Holocaust survivors whom he described as "ardent Zionists."
Speaking by telephone from her home in Potomac, Md., this week, Ms. Henochowicz said it was "upsetting, when someone gets an injury, not only to have to deal with the physical consequences of something you did not do to yourself, but the economic consequences as well."
Ms. Henochowicz, who was treated at Hadassah University Medical Center in Ein Kerem, had her left eye removed and suffered fractures that required the insertion of titanium plates. She returned to the United States in early June, where she is continuing to visit doctors and specialists.
But more than the cost of the treatment in Israel, which amounted to about $10,000, there are clearly legal principles and interests at stake.
The student’s father, Dr. Stuart Henochowicz, said by telephone that he had not yet explored the question of whether his daughter’s insurance would cover the bill, because he was under the impression that it would be paid by the Ministry of Defense.
[…] The ministry said it had acted similarly in the case of Tristan Anderson, an American severely wounded by a tear-gas projectile in 2009. The ministry said that Mr. Anderson had filed a suit in the Tel Aviv District Court, where the issue of hospital expenses would be settled.
Mr. Sfard, the lawyer, said that from the start he told Dr. Henochowicz, who flew to Israel from the United States to be at his daughter’s bedside, "not to touch his wallet or to sign any check."
In a letter to the ministry, Mr. Sfard wrote, "It is insolent and preposterous to expect someone who was shot by the security forces, whether unintentionally, negligently or with criminal intention, to fund her own medical treatment."
[…] Avi Issacharoff, an Israeli journalist from the newspaper Haaretz, was watching the demonstration. "The police fired a tear-gas grenade, and then another and another," he wrote in June "I remember that what surprised me was the volley of grenade fire directly aimed directly at the demonstrators, not at the sky. After the fourth grenade, if I am not mistaken, a shout was heard about 100 meters away."
[…]
Afghanistan
8) Leaked files indicate U.S. pays Afghan media to run friendly stories
John Cook, Yahoo! News, Tue Jul 27, 1:18 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100727/wl_ynews/ynews_wl3247
Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.
Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as "our journalists" and directing them in how to do their jobs.
Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.
In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering "12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming" to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them "$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October": "The PRT provided 12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming to Radio Ghaznwyan FM Station and Radio Ghazni AM/FM Station for week of 6-12 Nov. Topics included Afghanistan History, Law, and Human Rights in both Dari and Pashto, and a spreadsheet with the specific radio content programming for the week of 6-12 Nov will be forward sepcor to SPARTAN. Additionally, PRT paid Radio Ghaznwyan $3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October."
Radio Ghaznawiyaan was established and funded by the Agency for International Development, but USAID has described it in the past as a success story for local independent journalism launched with American help. So its listeners may be surprised to learn that it is an outlet for paid U.S. "PSYOP radio content."
Another message, from 2008, records a meeting that members of the Bagram PRT held with Rahimullah Samander, the news director of the Wakht News Agency and president of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association. Samander, the memo says, "proposed a partnership with the PRT" and "offered to include PRT news articles and photos on his news service": "Kapisa team met with a Kabul radio representative at the Kapisa TV and Radio Station. Met with Rahimullah Samander, news director for Wakht News Agency and president of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association. He provided information about his organizations and proposed a partnership with the PRT. He offered to include PRT news articles and photos on his news service. The PRT IO recommended a conference including Afghan and US military journalists to collaborate and share ideas. Samander hopes to increase the presence of his agency in Kapisa province."
[…]
Iran
9) WikiLeaks and the Iran-AQ Connection
Marc Lynch, Foreign Policy, Tuesday, July 27, 2010
http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/07/27/wikileaks_and_the_iran_aq_connection
Most of the response to the WikiLeaks Afghanistan document release thus far has focused on the absence of major revelations, with most of the details reinforcing existing analysis rather than undermining official discourse about the war. A similar response is appropriate to a story making the rounds that the documents bolster the case for significant connections between Iran and al-Qaeda. Information in the documents, according to the Wall Street Journal, "appear to give new evidence of direct contacts between Iranian officials and the Taliban’s and al Qaeda’s senior leadership." What’s more important in these stories than the details found in the documents about Iran’s activities in Afghanistan is the attempt to spin them into a narrative of "Iranian ties to al-Qaeda" to bolster the weak case for an American attack on Iran.
There’s no secret about Iran’s role in Afghanistan, of course – this has long been a staple of the debate over Afghan policy, and has also long been pointed out as an area of potential cooperation or conflict between Washington and Tehran. As with much of the rest of the WikiLeaks documents, much of what has been found about Iran’s role in Afghanistan is already generally known, while other information in them is of dubious provenance. It’s not like we didn’t know about Iran and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. These new details do add to the case for taking Iran into account more effectively when designing Afghanistan policy, on both the military and political dimensions. But they don’t add up to some kind of smoking gun demonstrating an Iranian alliance with al-Qaeda.
This use of the WikiLeaks documents brings back some old memories, of a long time ago (March 2006) in a galaxy far far away when the Pentagon posted a massive set of captured Iraqi documents on the internet without context. Analysts dived into them, mostly searching for a smoking gun on Iraqi WMD or ties to al-Qaeda. The right-wing blogs and magazines ran with a series of breathless announcements that something had been found proving one case or another. Each finding would dissolve when put into context or subjected to scrutiny, and at the end it only further confirmed the consensus (outside of the fever swamps, at least) that there had been no significant ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. But the cumulative effect of each "revelation", even if subsequently discredited, probably fueled the conviction that such ties had existed and did help maintain support for the Iraq war among the faithful. The parallel isn’t exact – in this case, there actually is something real there, and these documents were released against the government’s will – but it does raise some flags about how such documents can be used and misused in the public debate.
That experience is something to remember when an "Iranian ties to al-Qaeda" claim, loosely backed by reference to these documents, enters into the argument to attack Iran which I expect to heat up in the coming few months.
[…]
10) Tea Party Caucus members endorse Israeli attack on Iran,
Josh Rogin, Foreign Policy, Monday, July 26, 2010 http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/07/26/tea_party_caucus_members_endorse_israeli_attack_on_iran
Now that the congressional supporters of the Tea Party movement have formed their own caucus, their policy positions are becoming easier to track. Expanding their foray into foreign policy, 21 members of the new caucus have now come out explicitly endorsing Israel’s right to strike Iran’s nuclear program.
Almost two dozen Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers cosponsored a new resolution late last week that expresses their support for Israel "to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force."
The lead sponsor of the resolution was Texas Republican Louie Gohmert, one of four congressmen to announce the formation of the 44-member Tea Party caucus at a press conference on July 21. The other three Tea Party Caucus leaders, Michele Bachmann, R-MN, Steve King, R-IA, and John Culberson, R-TX, are also sponsors of the resolution. In total, 21 Tea Party Caucus members have signed on, according to the latest list of caucus members put out by Bachmann’s office.
[…]
Honduras
11) Honduras Faces Criticism Over Journalist Killings After a Coup.
Elisabeth Malkin, New York Times, July 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/world/americas/27honduras.html
Mexico City – The Honduran government’s failure to investigate the killings of seven journalists this year has fostered "a climate of lawlessness that is allowing criminals to kill journalists with impunity," the Committee to Protect Journalists concluded in a report released Tuesday. The seven killings all occurred against a backdrop of political unrest set off by the coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya 13 months ago.
The political conflict has continued since then, creating significant difficulties for the nation’s current president, Porfirio Lobo, who was elected in November. He has been lobbying to gain international recognition, but has run up against resistance by his counterparts in South America, preventing his country’s return to the Organization of American States, the main regional body.
Under pressure from the United States, Mr. Lobo has established a truth commission to investigate the events surrounding the coup and appointed a human rights adviser. But human rights violations – directed mostly against the coup’s opponents, human rights defenders and activists – continue, according to a report last month by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In addition to killings, the commission cited kidnappings, arbitrary detentions, sexual violations and illegal searches of "members of the resistance to the coup d’état" and their families. But the lack of proper investigation by the judicial system made it more difficult to "clarify the question of whether these are related to the context of the coup d’état," it said.
The cases of the journalists have become emblematic of the persistent dangers. "The government’s ongoing failure to successfully investigate crimes against journalists and other social critics – whether by intention, impotence or incompetence – has created a climate of pervasive impunity," wrote Mike O’Connor, the investigator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The group describes seven killings of journalists from March to mid-June of this year, including the March 14 killing of Nahúm Palacios, the main anchor of Channel 5 television in the agricultural town of Tocoa and an outspoken opponent of the coup. Not only did his position on the coup anger the military, but Mr. Palacios had also managed to annoy powerful landowners before his death by taking the side of several thousand peasants who had occupied land.
[…]
Colombia
12) NGO: US provided aid to ‘false positive’ culprits.
Kirsten Begg, Colombia Reports, Monday, 26 July 2010
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/11003-ngo-us-provides-aid-to-false-positive-culprits.html
U.S.-based NGO the Fellowship of Reconciliation alleges that Colombian military units, which are implicated in cases of extrajudicial killings known as "false positives," received help from the U.S. government, in spite of a law which prohibits such assistance.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation Program Director John Lindsay-Polland confirmed to Colombia Reports Monday that the NGO will publish a full report outlining the allegations on Thursday
Lindsay-Polland explained that a U.S. law known as the Leahy provision stipulates that the North American state is prohibited from providing assistance to foreign military units guilty of human rights violations. However the Fellowship of Reconciliation alleges that the Pentagon provided assistance to several Colombian military units implicated in extra judicial killings, including the 11th Cordoba and Sucre brigade.
"The United States completely helped for three years, it helped following reports of executions committed by the brigade, and during the assistance from the United States, these reports of false positives grew… and it wasn’t until 2008 when they arrested military officials for collaborating with [drug trafficking gang] ‘Los Paisas’ that the assistance was suspended," Lindsay-Polland told Uno Noticias. The forthcoming report also alleges that Antioquia’s 4th brigade also received indirect support from the U.S.
[…]
13) US reversal on visa denied to Colombian journalist
Frank Bajak, AP, July 27, 2010
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hgl6QDMsRPSO9Wa32a9Az-rEpdQAD9H7IUS80
Bogota, Colombia – The U.S. State Department has reversed its decision to deny a visa to a leading Colombian journalist whose reporting has been highly critical of the country’s U.S.-allied president.
"Happy, happy! This was terrible," a relieved Hollman Morris, an independent TV producer and reporter, told The Associated Press after he and his family picked up their visas at the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday. Morris, his wife and their two children can now travel to Harvard for a yearlong Nieman Foundation fellowship for mid-career journalists.
A U.S. consular officer in Bogota told the journalist last month he was ruled permanently eligible for a visa under the "terrorist activities" clause of the USA Patriot Act.
[…] Morris expressed deep gratitude for the support he has gotten from fellow journalists at home and abroad, lawmakers in the U.S. Congress and organizations including Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, The InterAmerican Press Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, who decried the visa denial as an attack on free speech. Some said it put Morris’ life in danger.
Morris blamed a smear campaign by allies of outgoing President Alvaro Uribe, who had accused him of being "an accomplice of terrorism." That effort "was about trying to silence a journalist who his entire career has sought to bring attention to the victims, to the invisible," he said.
Morris, who produces the TV news show "Contravia," has reported on ties between illegal far-right militias and allies of Uribe, Washington’s closest ally in Latin America.
[…] On various occasions, Uribe has accused him of collaborating with rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which killed Uribe’s father in a 1983 botched kidnapping. Morris acknowledges having contacts with the FARC – it’s part of his work, he says – but denied aiding, abetting or advising the rebels in any way.
He was among journalists, judges and opposition politicians whose phones were illegally tapped by Colombia’s DAS state security agency. Prosecutors weighing criminal charges are currently questioning Uribe’s closest aides about the eavesdropping.
[…]
–
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.