Just Foreign Policy News
August 8, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
A Historic Opportunity to Cut Military Spending
The agreement in Washington to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for deficit reduction has made a lot of people very unhappy. But the agreement had one important positive aspect: it created a historic opportunity for significant cuts in projected military spending.
http://www.truth-out.org/historic-opportunity-cut-military-spending/1312567362
Take Action: Urge Congress and the President to Put Military Cuts First in Line
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/cutpentagonfirst
Gloria Steinem: The Arms Race Intrudes on Paradise
Writing in the New York Times, Gloria Steinem decries U.S. plans to build a naval base on Jeju Island in South Korea – a UNESCO World Heritage site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/Steinem-the-arms-race-intrudes-on-a-south-korean-paradise.html
Daily Beast: Who’s the War President?
The number of American troops abroad has dropped less than 1 percent under President Obama, buoyed by what appears to be a sharp rise in the number of clandestine assignments.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/05/president-obama-president-bush-and-the-march-of-u-s-soldiers-abroad-where-they-are-and-why.html
Truthout: UN Challenges Slavery Conditions for Domestic Workers
The ILO convention calls for guaranteeing domestic workers key rights that other workers enjoy.
http://www.truth-out.org/international-convention-challenges-slavery-conditions-domestic-workers/1311356818
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) In the deadliest day for US forces in the nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a helicopter Saturday, killing 30 Americans, the New York Times reports. The attack showed showed how deeply entrenched the insurgency remains even far from its main strongholds in southern Afghanistan, the NYT says. The fighters are entirely Afghans and almost all local residents who resent both the NATO presence and the Afghan government, the NYT says.
2) Area residents said the 30 U.S. soldiers were operating in a Taliban-controlled valley where frequent U.S.-led night raids have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and won the insurgents popular support, McClatchy reports. "The Americans are committing barbaric acts in the area and this is the reason that the Taliban have influence," said a doctor who lives in the area.
3) For the second time in a week, a joint Iraqi-American night raid resulted in the killing of civilians, the New York Times reports. Witnesses said Iraqi and American forces opened fire on civilians and threw grenades early Friday, killing a 13-year-old boy and an off-duty police officer. Coming soon after a botched raid on July 30, the operation is sure to complicate talks over whether US troops should remain in Iraq, the NYT says. US officials initially told reporters that they did not participate directly in the raid, only providing helicopter support, but they changed their story after their claims were contradicted by witnesses.
Muhammad Farhan, a 62-year-old farmer, said Iraqi and American forces knocked down his door around 2 a.m. Friday, tied him and three of his relatives up and took them outside. He said that the Iraqi and US forces searched his house, stole a check from him and took his brother’s passport. "The Americans were telling us we are liars and terrorists," Farhan said. "Why do you attack us? We are just innocent people."
4) Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr reiterated his threat to have his thousands of followers attack any US troops that stay past the Dec. 31 deadline to leave Iraq, AP reports. In June, 15 US soldiers were killed, making it the bloodiest month for the US military in Iraq in two years. Nearly all of the deaths were in attacks by Shiite militias bent on forcing out US troops on schedule, AP notes.
5) Before he became the State Department legal adviser, Harold Hongju Koh was one of the country’s foremost defenders of the notion that the President can’t wage wars without the approval of Congress, notes Paul Starobin, writing in the New York Times. Now Koh is the administration’s defender of staying engaged in conflict against Libya without Congressional approval. He argues that the president can proceed because the country is not actually engaging in "hostilities." Legal advisers at both the Justice Department and Pentagon have declined to back the no-hostilities brief.
A contorted reading of a law to suit a president’s political need can only invite further such contortions, Starobin writes. Koh’s opinion may set a worrisome precedent for the next war. His logic suggests that a war without US boots on the ground can proceed indefinitely without Congressional approval. With drone warfare now expanding – with Koh’s approval – national-security decision-making stands to become the sole province of the executive.
Afghanistan
6) Afghan officials said a woman and seven young children were killed in southern Afghanistan when NATO called in an airstrike on a mud compound, the New York Times reports. The home belonged to a local imam who Afghan officials say was helping the Taliban. He was killed along with one of his two wives and his seven children, all younger than 7 years old, the local governor said.
Israel/Palestine
7) EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton condemned Israel’s approval of 900 new housing units in East Jerusalem, Haaretz reports. The housing project will expand the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa which is within what is defined as Jerusalem’s city limits [so defined by the Israeli government, not recognized by anyone else – JFP] but is directly adjacent to the Palestinian town of Bethlehem [in other words, is in the occupied West Bank, even though the Israeli government calls it "Jerusalem" – JFP.] "The European Union has repeatedly urged the government of Israel to immediately end all settlement activities in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem. All settlement activities are illegal under international law," Ashton said.
Iran
8) At least 33 high-ranking former U.S. officials have given speeches to MEK-friendly audiences since December, Christina Wilkie reports for the Huffington Post. MEK-affiliated groups have spent millions of dollars on speaking fees. The MEK is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, and providing direct assistance or services to them is against the law, as is taking payment from them. [Wilkie asks why Howard Dean, for example, isn’t arrested, and answers her own question by saying that the money is laundered through speaking agencies; it is hard to see this explanation as plausible, given the history of prosecutions of Americans for similar activity in other cases – JFP.]
Yemen
9) The London newspaper Asharq al-Awsat ["Middle East"] reported that US officials have convinced Yemeni President Saleh not to return to Yemen, Reuters reports. Yemeni officials denied the report. Asharq al-Awsat cited U.S. sources as saying Saleh had been greatly influenced by the spectacle of Mubarak’s trial in Egypt. Saleh and his family would get greater guarantees of immunity than they were promised earlier, the paper said.
Mexico
10) The US is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, the New York Times reports, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results. The latest steps come a year before elections in both countries, when President Calderón’s political party faces a Mexican electorate that is almost certainly going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly 45,000 people dead. It is hard to say much real progress has been made in crippling the brutal cartels or stemming the flow of drugs and guns across the border, the Times says.
"The government has argued that the number of deaths in Mexico is proof positive that the strategy is working and that the cartels are being weakened," said Nik Steinberg of Human Rights Watch. "But the data is indisputable – the violence is increasing, human rights abuses have skyrocketed and accountability both for officials who commit abuses and alleged criminals is at rock bottom."
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Copter Downed by Taliban Fire; Elite U.S. Unit Among Dead
Ray Rivera, Alissa J. Rubin and Thom Shanker, New York Times, August 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/asia/07afghanistan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – In the deadliest day for American forces in the nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter on Saturday, killing 30 Americans, including some Navy Seal commandos from the unit that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as 8 Afghans, American and Afghan officials said.
The helicopter, on a night-raid mission in the Tangi Valley of Wardak Province, to the west of Kabul, was most likely brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, one coalition official said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and they could hardly have found a more valuable target: American officials said that 22 of the dead were Navy Seal commandos, including members of Seal Team 6. Other commandos from that team conducted the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Bin Laden in May. The officials said that those who were killed Saturday were not involved in the Pakistan mission.
Saturday’s attack came during a surge of violence that has accompanied the beginning of a drawdown of American and NATO troops, and it showed how deeply entrenched the insurgency remains even far from its main strongholds in southern Afghanistan and along the Afghan-Pakistani border in the east. American soldiers had recently turned over the sole combat outpost in the Tangi Valley to Afghans.
[…] The Tangi Valley traverses the border between Wardak and Logar Province, an area where security has worsened over the past two years, bringing the insurgency closer to the capital, Kabul. It is one of several inaccessible areas that have become havens for insurgents, according to operations and intelligence officers with the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, which patrols the area. The mountainous region, with its steeply pitched hillsides and arid shale, laced by small footpaths and byways, has long been an area that the Taliban have used to move between Logar and Wardak, local officials said.
Officers at a forward operating base near the valley described Tangi as one of the most troubled areas in Logar and Wardak Provinces. "There’s a lot happening in Tangi," said Capt. Kirstin Massey, 31, the assistant intelligence officer for Fourth Brigade Combat Team in an interview last week. "It’s a stronghold for the Taliban."
The fighters are entirely Afghans and almost all local residents, Captain Massey said, noting that "We don’t capture any fighters who are non-Afghans."
The redoubts in these areas pose the kind of problems the military faced last year in similarly remote areas of Kunar Province, forcing commanders to weigh the mission’s value given the cost in soldiers’ lives and dollars spent in places where the vast majority of the insurgents are local residents who resent both the NATO presence and the Afghan government.
[…]
2) In Valley Where SEALs Died, U.S. Raids Boost Taliban Support
Jonathan S. Landay and Hashim Shukoor, McClatchy Newspapers, August 08, 2011
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/07/119797/valley-where-us-troops-died-supports.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – The 30 U.S. soldiers, many of them Navy SEALs, who died Saturday in the U.S. military’s single biggest loss of the Afghan war, were operating in a Taliban-controlled valley where frequent U.S.-led night raids have won the insurgents popular support, area residents said Sunday.
The raids occur "every night. We are very much miserable," said Roshanak Wardak, a doctor and a former member of the national Parliament. "They are coming to our houses at night."
Wardak runs a clinic about 3 miles from the rugged Tangi Valley where insurgents early Saturday shot down a helicopter carrying the U.S. troops, an Afghan translator and seven Afghan commandoes.
Night raids have become a significant part of the U.S. strategy aimed at weakening the insurgents and compelling their leaders to accept U.S. and Afghan government offers to hold talks on a political settlement of the decade-old war.
The Taliban have suffered heavy losses in the operations, which have soared since last year to an average of 340 per month, according to a Western intelligence official, who requested anonymity in order to discuss the issue.
[…] The tactic, however, has proven highly controversial with ordinary Afghans amid charges that they claim civilian lives. President Hamid Karzai has demanded that they stop.
Residents of the Tangi Valley area, in eastern Wardak Province, about 60 miles southwest of Kabul, issued similar complaints about the night raids in their vicinity, charging that they have killed civilians, disrupted their lives and fueled popular support for the Taliban.
"There are night raids every day or every other day," said a second doctor who asked not to be identified because he feared for his safety. He said he lives about 100 yards from the parched riverbed where the U.S. Chinook helicopter crashed.
"The Americans are committing barbaric acts in the area and this is the reason that the Taliban have influence," he said.
The second doctor and another area resident, Abdul Rehman Barakzai, said that as many as three civilians were killed in a U.S. raid in the vicinity on Friday night. Speaking in separate telephone interviews, each said that a tailor was among the dead.
[…]
3) Iraqi Civilians Die in Raid, Complicating Pullout Talks
Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times, August 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/middleeast/07iraq.html
Baghdad – For the second time in a week, a joint Iraqi-American raid aiming at insurgents resulted in the killing of civilians.
Witnesses in the village of Ishaqi, just south of Tikrit, said Iraqi and American forces opened fire on civilians and threw grenades early Friday as they conducted the raid. The villagers said the forces were responding to gunfire from people in the village and then fired back, killing a 13-year-old boy and an off-duty police officer.
[…] The operation, coming so soon after a botched raid on July 30, is sure to complicate politically fraught talks over whether American troops should remain in Iraq after the end of the year.
Amid pressure from American officials, who privately say some troops should remain, the Iraqi government announced on Wednesday that it would begin negotiations about a continued American troop presence.
Some politicians were already railing against the Americans for Friday’s raid, criticizing troops in the local press for once again violating Iraq’s sovereignty.
[…] On Friday, the officials said that they had provided helicopter support, explaining that it might have given the false impression that the raid was an American operation. They also said the Iraqi forces were often mistaken for Americans because of their equipment and techniques.
But on Saturday, after further questions based on eyewitness reports that Americans were involved, the military issued the statement saying some American troops had participated.
A local official and two witnesses said that the firing started when a villager shot at the forces because he believed they were thieves.
"We heard gunfire near our house, and my son woke up and went to the garden because he was afraid," said the boy’s mother, Nagia Gamas, 51. "They shot him and my husband."
The raid on July 30 in the grape farming village of Al Rufait left three dead, including a tribal sheik, and there were conflicting reports about whether the troops were shot at before opening fire. The United States military said that Americans had participated along with the Iraqis, but the raid was controversial partly because its target was not found. Local officials say that while the village may have once harbored insurgent sympathies, it is not a hotbed of the Sunni insurgency.
The Americans would like to have some troops remain in Iraq in part to serve as a counterweight to Iran.
[…] For Muhammad Farhan, a 62-year-old farmer in Ishaqi, the political debate has become personal. He said Iraqi and American forces knocked down his door around 2 a.m. Friday, tied him and three of his relatives up and took them outside.
He said that the Iraqi and American forces searched his house, stole a check from him and took his brother’s passport. "The Americans were telling us we are liars and terrorists," Mr. Farhan said. "Why do you attack us? We are just innocent people."
4) Moktada Al-Sadr Warns U.S. Troops To Leave Iraq
Associated Press, August 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/world/middleeast/08iraq.html
Baghdad – A powerful anti-American Shiite cleric on Sunday reiterated his threat to have his thousands of followers attack any United States troops that stay past the current Dec. 31 deadline to leave Iraq.
The threat, by Moktada al-Sadr and posted on his Web site, followed the Iraqi government’s decision last week to open talks with Washington about keeping some troops here beyond year’s end. But worried about a potential backlash, Iraqi officials have tried to portray any American soldiers who remained as trainers of the growing Iraqi military rather than as combat troops.
Part of what American troops do in Iraq now is training. But they also assist in Iraqi counterterrorism operations and, if under attack, defend themselves.
While security in Iraq has improved in recent years, attacks are still common. In June, 15 American soldiers were killed, making it the bloodiest month for the United States military here in two years. Nearly all of the deaths were in attacks by Shiite militias bent on forcing out American troops on schedule.
"They will be treated as anyone who stays in Iraq, as a tyrannical occupier that must be resisted by military means," Mr. Sadr said in his statement, partly aimed at Iraqi political leaders. "The government which agrees to them staying, even if it is for training, is a weak government."
5) A Moral Flip-Flop? Defining A War
Paul Starobin, New York Times, August 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/harold-kohs-flip-flop-on-the-libya-question.html
Harold Hongju Koh, the former dean of the Yale Law School, has been one of the country’s foremost defenders of the notion that the president of the United States can’t wage wars without the approval of Congress. During the Bush administration, he was legendary for his piercing criticisms of "executive muscle flexing" in the White House’s pursuit of the so-called war on terror.
Even more, he was described by those who knew him as the inspiration for a generation of human rights activists and lawyers passionately committed to a vision of a post-imperial America as a model of constitutional restraint. His colleagues viewed him as not only a brilliant scholar but a "liberal icon."
Suddenly, though, Mr. Koh seems to be a different person.
Just over two years ago, he became legal adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department, and in that job, he has become the administration’s defender of the right to stay engaged in a conflict against Libya without Congressional approval. He argues that the president can proceed because the country is not actually engaging in "hostilities." Because "hostilities" is "an ambiguous standard," he has argued, the president need not withdraw forces to meet the resolution’s requirement of an automatic pull-out, 60 days after "hostilities" begin, absent express Congressional approval for the war. The conflict is in its fourth month, and no such consent has been given.
Mr. Koh’s allies, speaking more in sorrow than in anger, are mystified and disheartened to see their hero engaging in legalistic "word play." To them, it’s as if he has torn off his team jersey, midgame, and put on the other side’s. Mary Ellen O’Connell, a Notre Dame law professor who has known Mr. Koh for a quarter-century, is seeking an answer to this question: "Where is the Harold Koh I worked with to ensure that international law, human rights and the Constitution were honored during the Bush years?"
[…] Whatever his motivations, it is sad to see Mr. Koh, with all his acumen, stretched out on a legal limb so long and so thin that one can almost hear it cracking. Talk, he suggested, to Laurence H. Tribe – the eminent constitutional law scholar whose course Mr. Koh took at Harvard Law. But no rescue came. "Harold is a good friend, one of my finest former law students," Professor Tribe said in an e-mail, but "I disagree completely with his analysis of the War Powers Resolution."
He is not winning support for his position in the academic world or even in some key parts of the administration. Legal advisers at both the Justice Department and Pentagon have declined to back the no-hostilities brief. One defender of this position, the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar, said that because "there are no body bags" of United States soldiers to this date, hostilities in Libya do not involve America.
But a common-sense definition of "hostilities" suggests they began back in March when American warplanes bombed the Qaddafi regime’s air-defense systems, noted Lori Fisler Damrosch, a Columbia law professor who in 1990 joined with Mr. Koh on a brief to compel the executive branch to share war powers with Congress.
The damage wrought by Mr. Koh’s volte-face extends well beyond his "liberal icon" reputation in the academy. A contorted reading of a law to suit a president’s political need can only invite further such contortions (and more public cynicism about Washington). And Mr. Koh’s opinion may set a worrisome precedent for the next war. His logic suggests that a war without United States boots on the ground can proceed indefinitely without Congressional approval. With drone warfare now expanding, with Mr. Koh’s approval, national-security decision-making stands to become the sole province of the executive.
In Mr. Koh’s 1990 book "The National Security Constitution," which established his reputation as a bedrock believer in shared powers, he offered a lamentation on "why the president almost always wins in foreign affairs." One reason, he said, was "Congressional acquiescence."
Another, it seems, is that an imaginative executive-branch lawyer, in a pinch, can invent an argument that does the trick.
Afghanistan
6) Airstrike Reportedly Kills Civilians In Southern Afghanistan
Ray Rivera and Taimoor Shah, New York Times, August 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/asia/07helmand.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – A woman and seven young children were killed in southern Afghanistan when a coalition patrol called in an airstrike against insurgents firing on them from a mud compound, said Saturday. NATO said it was investigating the attack.
Habibullah Shamlani, the governor of Nad-Ali, the district in Helmand Province where the attack occurred, said the NATO foot patrol came under fire Friday from the compound. One soldier was killed, and an Afghan interpreter was wounded. The home belonged to Mullah Abdul Hadi, 50, a local imam who Afghan officials say was helping the Taliban. He was killed along with one of his two wives and his seven children, all younger than 7 years old, Mr. Shamlani said.
[…]
Israel/Palestine
8) EU slams Israel’s decision to build new East Jerusalem housing project
Akiva Eldar, Haaretz/AFP, 06.08.11
Catherine Ashton says timing of decision particularly regrettable, undermining the international community’s recent attempts to reestablish trust between the sides.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/eu-slams-israel-s-decision-to-build-new-east-jerusalem-housing-project-1.377216
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton condemned Israel’s approval of 900 new housing units in East Jerusalem, AFP reported on Friday, saying the new move damaged Israel’s prospects for peace.
The housing project will expand the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa which is within what is defined as Jerusalem’s city limits, but is directly adjacent to the Palestinian town of Bethlehem.
"The European Union has repeatedly urged the government of Israel to immediately end all settlement activities in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem. All settlement activities are illegal under international law," AFP quoted Ashton as saying in a statement.
"Continued settlement undermines trust between the parties and efforts to resume negotiations. This is especially true with regard to Jerusalem," the EU chief said, adding "I believe there can be no sustainable peace in the Middle East without a two-state solution with the state of Israel and a viable and contiguous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security."
"Settlement activity damages this prospect," she cautioned.
[…]
Iran
8) Mujahideen-e Khalq: Former U.S. Officials Make Millions Advocating For Terrorist Organization
Christina Wilkie, Huffington Post, 8/8/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/08/mek-lobbying_n_913233.html
Washington — The ornate ballroom of the Willard Hotel buzzed with activity on a Saturday morning in July. Crowded together on the stage sat a cadre of the nation’s most influential former government officials, the kind whose names often appear in boldface, who’ve risen above daily politics to the realm of elder statesmen. They were perched, as they so often are, below a banner with a benign conference title on it, about to offer words of pricey wisdom to an audience with an agenda.
That agenda: to secure the removal of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) from the U.S. government’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. A Marxian Iranian exile group with cult-like qualities, Mujahideen-e Khalq was responsible for the killing of six Americans in Iran in the 1970s, along with staging a handful of bombings. But for a terrorist organization with deep pockets, it appears there’s always hope.
Onstage next to former FBI director Louis Freeh sat Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and current MSNBC talking head; former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean; former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton; former Secretary of Veterans Affairs Togo West; former State Department Director of Policy Planning Mitchell Reiss; former Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James T. Conway; Anita McBride, the former chief of staff to First Lady Laura Bush; and Sarah Sewall, a Harvard professor who sits on a corporate board with Reiss.
All told, at least 33 high-ranking former U.S. officials have given speeches to MEK-friendly audiences since December of last year as part of more than 22 events in Washington, Brussels, London, Paris and Berlin. While not every speaker accepted payment, MEK-affiliated groups have spent millions of dollars on speaking fees, according to interviews with the former officials, organizers and attendees.
Rendell freely admits he knew little about the group, also known as People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI), before he was invited to speak just days earlier. But he told the audience that the elite status of his fellow panelists and the arguments they made for delisting the group were enough to convince him that it was a good idea.
The event where Rendell spoke was just part of a surge in pro-MEK lobbying efforts in Washington during the past year, spurred by an ongoing State Department review of the group’s status, which is expected to be completed this month. In addition to funding conferences with influential speakers, supporters have taken out issue ads in newspapers, placed op-eds in major publications, commissioned academic papers, hired new lobbying firms and made scores of visits to lawmakers.
At first glance, these methods seem like standard Washington lobbying practices. But the MEK is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, and providing direct assistance or services to them is against the law, as is taking payment from them. So why isn’t Howard Dean under arrest? The operative word is "direct".
The MEK’s delisting campaign is funded by a fluid and enigmatic network of support groups based in the United States. According to an MEK leader, these groups are funded by money from around the world, which they deliberately shield from U.S. authorities. These domestic groups book and pay for their VIP speakers through speaker agencies, which in turn pay the speakers directly and take a fee for arranging appearances. That way, the speakers themselves don’t technically accept money from the community groups. If they did, they might discover what their speaker agents surely know: That most of the groups are run by ordinary, middle-class Iranian Americans working out of their homes — people who seem unlikely to have an extra few hundred thousand dollars laying around to pay speaker fees and book five-star hotels to bolster the MEK’s cause.
The speakers are just the type of national-security heavyweights a plaintiff terrorist organization needs. In addition to those named above, the commissioned figureheads include Obama’s recently-departed National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones; former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge; onetime State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow and former CIA directors Porter Goss and James R. Woolsey.
Retired military officers are popular — former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark and former Commander in Chief of United States Central Command Gen. Anthony Zinni have both addressed MEK groups. Yet more speakers appear to have been chosen for their deep political ties, such as former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former New Mexico Gov. and U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson, former Bush White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, former Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and former 9/11 Commission Chairman Lee Hamilton.
Hamilton acknowledged to IPS News that he was paid for his appearances, describing his fee at the time as "significant." Dean also acknowledged that he was paid for at least a portion of the speeches he gave to MEK groups in London, Paris and Washington, as did Gen. Clark. Gen. Jones told The Wall Street Journal that he received a "standard speaking fee." Gen. Zinni’s speaker agent confirmed that Zinni was also paid his "standard speaking fee" for an eight-minute address at an MEK-related conference in January — between $20,000 and $30,000, according to his speaker profile. The same firm arranged for Zelikow to speak at two MEK-affiliated events this spring, and it recruited John Sano, the former deputy director of the National Clandestine Service, for his first MEK-related appearance on July 26.
Goss’s first speech to an MEK support group was in April. He told The Huffington Post that it had been handled entirely by his speaker agent and that his payment came from his agent. According to his profile, Goss commands a minimum of $20,000 to $30,000 per engagement.
"I never discuss my speaking fees," Card told HuffPost when asked how much he was paid for seven minutes’ worth of remarks in late July on Capitol Hill. His standard fee, however, is between $25,000 and $40,000 per speech. Gov. Richardson’s office referred questions to his speaker agent, who did not return a call for comment, but Richardson’s standard speaker fees are the same as Card’s.
Woolsey was the only one of the speakers who reported that he waived his standard fees for MEK-supporting events, citing his belief in the cause as his motivation for appearing.
Sewall, on the other hand, carefully distanced herself from the MEK’s objectives. "I was invited to speak at a conference on the Arab Spring and I received a speaker fee," she said of her July 16 speech. "My remarks were aimed at an Iranian American audience that was concerned about Camp Ashraf. I, too, am concerned about the ongoing humanitarian situation there. But I would not want my presence at the conference to be equated with a position on the delisting of the MEK."
The rest of the speakers did not respond to repeated requests for comment by email and phone from The Huffington Post. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the roster of marquis names illustrates just how far some elder statesmen on government pensions will go to fund their (very) golden years.
But not everyone accepts invitations to speak at MEK-related events. Despite offers of up to $40,000 for notably brief remarks, sources with knowledge of speaker negotiations said at least four invited speakers have declined this year because they had questions about the ultimate goals.
The payment of a speaker’s fee does not, of course, imply that the speaker has been told what to say. Indeed, while most of the panelists at MEK-affiliated conferences support at least part of the Iranian network’s agenda, others avoid mentioning the exile group at all.
In both cases, what they say is less important to the group’s cause than the mere fact that they show up and say it. Unless a speaker has a can’t-lose stock tip, nobody is inherently worth $20,000 for a six-minute speech — it’s the shine of the speaker’s credibility that the MEK’s supporters are buying. The group has a well-documented history of conflating speakers’ attendance at these events and deducing from that a broad endorsement of their agenda. Facilitating this is the point of the invitation, and both sides are sophisticated enough to know it, whether it’s written in their speaker contracts or not.
[…]
Yemen
9) U.S. convinces Saleh not to return to Yemen: report
Erika Solomon, Reuters, Mon Aug 8, 2011, 7:11am EDT
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/08/us-yemen-president-usa-idUSTRE7771V120110808
Dubai – U.S. officials have convinced Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, convalescing in Saudi Arabia from an assassination attempt, not to return to his country, the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported on Monday.
The report came a day after the veteran Arab leader left hospital in Riyadh and was moved to a government residence for further recuperation, as mass protests against his 33-year rule wore into their seventh month.
Yemeni officials denied the report and said the president would return to Sanaa, where fighting between troops loyal to Saleh and pro-opposition tribesmen has been increasing.
[…] Citing U.S. sources, the London-based Asharq al-Awsat said Washington had managed to pressure Saleh, 69, into retreating from his promise to return and lead a dialogue in Yemen.
They told Asharq al-Awsat that Saleh had been greatly influenced by the spectacle of toppled Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, who faced charges from within a black cage in a Cairo court last week.
The sources told the paper the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Gerald Feierstein, had told the State Department to refrain from publicising pressure on the Yemeni president because he is "a stubborn person and cannot be put in a corner."
[…] But U.S. sources were quoted by Asharq al-Awsat as saying that Saleh had been convinced he should stay in Saudi Arabia, which has told the president he must sign the Gulf deal before he can remain permanently.
The deal would also be modified to give greater guarantees of immunity to Saleh and his family, the pan-Arab paper said.
Mexico
10) US Expands Its Presence in Mexico, Ramping Up Drug War
Ginger Thompson, New York Times, August 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/world/07drugs.html
Washington – The United States is expanding its role in Mexico’s bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few results.
In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where, for the first time, security officials from both countries work side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping plan operations. Officials are also looking into embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit.
Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced American surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption.
[…] The latest steps come three years after the United States began increasing its security assistance to Mexico with the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative and tens of millions of dollars from the Defense Department. They also come a year before elections in both countries, when President Obama may confront questions about the threat of violence spilling over the border, and President Felipe Calderón’s political party faces a Mexican electorate that is almost certainly going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly 45,000 people dead.
"The pressure is going to be especially strong in Mexico, where I expect there will be a lot more raids, a lot more arrests and a lot more parading drug traffickers in front of cameras," said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution. "But I would also expect a lot of questioning of Merida, and some people asking about the way the money is spent, or demanding that the government send it back to the gringos."
Mexico has become ground zero in the American counternarcotics fight since its cartels have cornered the market and are responsible for more than 80 percent of the drugs that enter the United States. American counternarcotics assistance there has grown faster in recent years than to Afghanistan and Colombia.
[…] Still, it is hard to say much real progress has been made in crippling the brutal cartels or stemming the flow of drugs and guns across the border. Mexico’s justice system remains so weakened by corruption that even the most notorious criminals have not been successfully prosecuted.
"The government has argued that the number of deaths in Mexico is proof positive that the strategy is working and that the cartels are being weakened," said Nik Steinberg, a specialist on Mexico at Human Rights Watch. "But the data is indisputable – the violence is increasing, human rights abuses have skyrocketed and accountability both for officials who commit abuses and alleged criminals is at rock bottom."
[…]
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