Just Foreign Policy News
September 6, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
Oil Change International: Keystone XL Pipeline Not Aimed at U.S. Market
A new report from Oil Change International takes aim at the argument that the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline should be supported because "it’s better to get oil from Canada than from OPEC." In addition to noting that there is a single global market for oil, so it doesn’t make any difference to the price faced by consumers where we get our oil from (e.g., the Libyan civil war raised gas prices in the U.S., even though Libya exports to Europe), the report notes that the companies that will receive oil from the Keystone XL pipeline are focused on exports, not supplying the U.S. market.
http://priceofoil.org/2011/08/31/report-exporting-energy-security-keystone-xl-exposed/
FAIR: NYT on WikiLeaks: Move Along, No Atrocity to See Here
As FAIR notes, while the New York Times was telling us on its editorial and op-ed pages that there were no revelations in the WikiLeaks cables damning to U.S. foreign policy, the Times was sitting on a cable that, as McClatchy noted, "provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a five-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi."
http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/09/01/nyt-on-wikileaks-move-along-no-atrocity-to-see-here/
*Action: Tell Congress: $200 Billion In "Real Savings" If We End the Wars "On Time"
Many Americans don’t realize that the Super Committee can reach 1/6 of its debt reduction goal just by withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan when we said we were going to. Urge your representatives in Congress to make this part of any debt reduction deal.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/endwarsontime
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) A video of UN soldiers apparently raping a Haitian teenager raises questions about why these ‘peacekeepers’ are there at all, writes Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian. There has been a dire pattern of abuses: in December 2007, more than 100 UN soldiers from Sri Lanka were deported under charges of sexual abuse of under-age girls. In 2005, UN troops went on the rampage in Cité Soleil, killing as many as 23 people. There is no legitimate reason for a military mission of the UN in Haiti, Weisbrot writes. The country has no civil war, and is not the subject of a peace-keeping or post-conflict agreement. And the fact that UN troops are immune from prosecution or legal action in Haiti encourages abuses.
2) Palestinian President Abbas said he was going to the UN this month to seek membership for a state of Palestine, not instead of negotiations with Israel, but in addition to them, the New York Times reports. Abbas said the Palestinians planned to start their membership drive with the Security Council despite a vow by the Obama administration to exercise its veto there. It is expected that the Palestinians’s next step would be in the General Assembly, where there is no veto but which can grant only observer [state] status, not full membership [the Palestinians already have "observer" status, the upgrade by the General Assembly would be to "observer state" status – JFP.]
3) Turkey said it would challenge Israel’s blockade on Gaza at the International Court of Justice, the Guardian reports. Turkey dramatically downgraded its relations with Israel, cutting military ties with Israel and expelling Israel’s ambassador over his government’s refusal to apologize for the killings of eight Turkish citizens and a Turkish American last May.
4) According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans say the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not made Americans safer, Think Progress reports. Almost half of Americans now say that U.S. foreign policy ("U.S. wrongdoing") may have been responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
5) The Congressional "Supercommittee" should consider war costs as it makes its plans for debt reduction, writes former New York Times foreign correspondent Joel Brinkley in the Des Moines Register. A recent Brown University study suggests that future war costs will swamp the SuperCommittee’s efforts.
6) As head of the CIA, Gen. Petraeus will supervise analysts who concluded in a recent assessment that the war in Afghanistan is heading toward a "stalemate," notes David Ignatius in the Washington Post. Petraeus maintained during his June 23 Senate confirmation hearing that he would give the analysts proper latitude in areas where he had been a commander, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. If the CIA analysts’ view becomes widely shared, and there’s growing sentiment in Washington that the $100 billion-plus annual campaign is only buying an expensive stalemate, Obama will have to re-examine the plan and the troop levels, Ignatius writes.
Iraq
7) A spokesman for Prime Minister Maliki of Iraq said the government would reopen an investigation into a March 2006 raid in which U.S. troops were accused of executing an Iraqi family, the New York Times reports. The decision came two days after McClatchy reported that a WikiLeaks cable disclosed that a senior UN official had warned the US in 2006 he had evidence indicating that US troops had executed the family in the town of Ishaqi. An investigation by the US military concluded three months after the killings that the accusations of an execution were "absolutely false." Daham Muhammad, whose family was killed in the raid, said on Friday that the cable provided additional evidence that his family had been executed.
Afghanistan
8) At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of this year, according to statistics compiled by NATO that show an increase in desertion, the Washington Post reports. The figure was more than twice as many as in the same period last year.
Libya
9) Many rebels are turning their wrath against migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, imprisoning hundreds for the crime of fighting as "mercenaries" for Qaddafi without any evidence except the color of their skin, the New York Times reports. Human rights advocates say the rebels’ scapegoating of blacks in Tripoli follows a similar campaign that ultimately included lynchings after rebels took control of Benghazi more than six months ago. Many Tripoli residents – including some local rebel leaders – now often use the Arabic word for "mercenaries" or "foreign fighters" as a catchall term to refer to any member of the city’s large underclass of African migrant workers, the Times says.
"It is very clear to us that most of those detained were not soldiers and have never held a gun in their life," said Peter Bouckaert, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who visited several jails.
Lebanon
10) In focusing entirely on alleged links between four Hezbollah activists and the 2005 bombing that killed Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri, the indictment by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has refused to acknowledge much stronger evidence that an Al-Qaeda cell was responsible for the assassination, writes Gareth Porter for Inter Press Service. Several members of an Al-Qaeda cell confessed in 2006 to having carried out the crime. The transcript of one of the interrogations shows that the testimony was provided without coercion and that it suggested that Al-Qaeda had indeed ordered the assassination. But the UN International Independent Investigation Commission was determined to pin the crime either on Syria or its Lebanese ally Hezbollah and refused to pursue the Al-Qaeda angle.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) UN Troops In Haiti Accused of Sexual Assault
Shock video of UN soldiers apparently raping a Haitian teenager raises questions about why these ‘peacekeepers’ are there at all
Mark Weisbrot, Guardian, Saturday 3 September 2011 13.00 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/03/minustah-un-haiti-abuse
[ABC story: "U.N. Peacekeepers Accused of Sexually Assaulting Haitian Teen"
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/peacekeepers-accused-sexually-assaulting-haitian-teen/story?id=14437122]
The video is profoundly disturbing. It shows four men, identified as Uruguayan troops from the UN mission in Haiti (Minustah), seemingly in the act of raping an 18-year-old Haitian youth. Two have the victim pinned down on a mattress, with his hands twisted high up his back so that he cannot move. Perhaps the most unnerving part of the video is the constant chorus of laughter from the alleged perpetrators; to them, apparently, it’s just a drunken party.
ABC News reports that a Uruguayan navy lieutenant, Nicolas Casariego, has confirmed the authenticity of the video. A medical certificate filed with the court in Port Salut, a southern coastal town where the incident took place, says that the victim was beaten and had injuries consistent with a sexual assault.
The incident is likely to pour more gasoline on the fire of resentment that Haitians have for the UN troops who have occupied their country for more than seven years. There has been a dire pattern of abuses: in December 2007, more than 100 UN soldiers from Sri Lanka were deported under charges of sexual abuse of under-age girls. In 2005, UN troops went on the rampage in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest areas in Port-au-Prince, killing as many as 23 people, including children, according to witnesses. After the raid, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders reported: "On that day, we treated 27 people for gunshot wounds. Of them, around 20 were women under the age of 18."
WikiLeaks cables released in the last week reveal that the Timothy Carney, representing the United States government as the top-ranking diplomat in Haiti in 2006, warned that such raids would "inevitably cause unintended civilian casualties given the crowded conditions and flimsy construction of tightly packed housing in Cité Soleil". But Washington – showing its lack of respect for human life in Haiti – offered no objections to further raids, which continued into 2006.
And make no mistake about it: the UN occupation of Haiti is really a US occupation – it is no more a multilateral force than George W Bush’s "coalition of the willing" that invaded Iraq. And it is hardly more legitimate, either: it was sent there in 2004 after a US-led effort toppled Haiti’s democratically elected government. Far from providing security for Haitians in the aftermath of the coup, Minustah stood by while thousands of Haitians who had supported the elected government were killed, and officials of the constitutional government jailed. Recent WikiLeaks cables also confirm that the US government sees Minustah as an instrument of its policy there.
This latest incident could shed some light on the nature of its mission, just as the photos from Abu Ghraib made plain for most of the world the brutality of the US occupation of Iraq. Images cannot be so easily dismissed or buried as words. And the images from this video are symbolic of what the "international community" has been doing to Haiti since the country won its independence from France in the world’s first successful slave-led revolution.
There is no legitimate reason for a military mission of the United Nations in Haiti. The country has no civil war, and is not the subject of a peace-keeping or post-conflict agreement. And the fact that UN troops are immune from prosecution or legal action in Haiti encourages abuses. The occupying troops don’t speak the language either, which severely limits their capacity for any positive security role; can you imagine how effective a police force in Washington, DC would be if it spoke only Japanese?
To make things even worse, it is now virtually certain that Minustah brought the cholera bacteria to Haiti that has killed more than 6,000 Haitians and infected more than 400,000 in the last 10 months. This was an act of gross negligence: there should have been supervision to make sure that fecal waste from UN troops was not dumped into the water supply, given the risks of such a deadly contamination and the known incapacity of Haiti’s water, sanitation and public health system.
How long can Minustah be allowed to continue to occupy and abuse Haiti?
2) Abbas Affirms Palestinian Bid for U.N. Membership
Ethan Bronner, New York Times, September 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/world/middleeast/06palestinians.html
Ramallah, West Bank – President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority said Monday that he was going to the United Nations this month to seek membership for a state of Palestine, not instead of negotiations with Israel, but in addition to them. His goal, he said, was for a Palestinian state and Israel to live in peace and security next to one another.
Even after any recognition by the United Nations, Mr. Abbas said, his hope is to negotiate with Israel. "Our first, second and third priority is negotiations," he said. "There is no other way to solve this. No matter what happens at the United Nations, we have to return to negotiations."
[…] Mr. Abbas was speaking in his office to 20 left-wing Israeli intellectuals and artists who had come to urge him to go to the United Nations despite their government’s opposition. Journalists were invited to cover the meeting.
He told the group that he had met abroad secretly three times in recent months with President Shimon Peres of Israel – in London and Rome, and in Amman, Jordan. A fourth meeting was called off by Mr. Peres. Mr. Abbas said he also held a previously undisclosed meeting with Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, 10 days ago. "We have exhausted all opportunities so we have to go to the U.N.," Mr. Abbas said.
[…] The United States is opposed to a Palestinian bid for membership in United Nations. Senior American officials are due here this week to try to persuade the Palestinians to drop their effort.
Mr. Abbas says for direct talks to begin, Israel should carry out a short-term freeze in settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as agree that the basis of the talks would be the lines drawn in 1967.
[…] Mr. Abbas said the Palestinians planned to start their membership drive with the Security Council despite a vow by the Obama administration to exercise its veto there. It is expected that the Palestinians’s next step would be in the General Assembly, where there is no veto but which can grant only observer status, not full membership.
[…]
3) Turkey to challenge Gaza blockade at International Court of Justice
Turkish announcement appears to rebuff attempts by UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon to end its row with Israel
David Batty, Guardian, Saturday 3 September 2011 17.16 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/03/turkey-challenge-israel-gaza-blockade
Turkey is to challenge Israel’s blockade on Gaza at the International Court of Justice, amid a worsening diplomatic crisis between the once close allies.
The announcement by Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu appears to rebuff UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s attempt to defuse the row over Israel’s armed assault on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in which nine people were killed.
Turkey dramatically downgraded its relations with Israel, cutting military ties with its former ally and expelling the country’s ambassador over his government’s refusal to apologise for the killings of eight Turkish citizens and a Turkish American last May.
Ban said today that the two countries should accept the recommendations of a UN report that examined the incident. The report found Israel had used "excessive and unreasonable" force to stop the flotilla approaching Gaza, but that it was justified in maintaining a naval blockade on the Palestinian enclave.
But Davutoglu later dismissed the report, stating it had not been endorsed by the UN and was therefore not binding. "What is binding is the International Court of Justice," he told Turkey’s state-run TRT television. "This is what we are saying: let the International Court of Justice decide.
"We are starting the necessary legal procedures this coming week."
[…]
4) Pew: Americans Say Wars In Iraq, Afghanistan Haven’t Made U.S. Safer
Kyle Leighton, Think Progress, September 2, 2011, 6:20AM
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/pew-americans-disagree-that-wars-in-iraq-afghanistan-have-lessened-the-chance-of-another-terror-atta.php
On the eve of the ten year anniversary of 9/11, the Pew Research Center has released new data on Americans’ reaction to the attacks, and the foreign and national security policies pursued in the post 9/11 era. They show a country with views that have evolved on the relationship between civil liberties and the tools given to government to fight terrorism, and a disbelief that the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped to lessen the chance there will be another terrorist attack on the United States.
[…] That result is coupled with a split on the overall causes for terror attacks against the United States: after 9/11, only 33 percent thought the attacks might have been at least partially the fault of US wrongdoing versus 55 percent who rejected that idea. Now the question is nearly split amongst Americans, with 43 percent saying the negative effects of American policies may have been to blame against 45 who take issue with that assumption.
[…] The real break Americans have is with foreign policy after 9/11, specifically the decision to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. "…only about a quarter say the wars in Iraq (26%) and Afghanistan (25%) have lessened the chances of terrorist attacks in the United States," the Pew report reads. "In both cases majorities say the wars either have increased the risk of terrorism in this country or made no difference."
[…]
5) War costs more than admitted – and it’s continuing to climb
Joel Brinkley, Des Moines Register, 09/04/2011
http://dmjuice.desmoinesregister.com/article/20110904/OPINION01/309040031/1035/OPINION
[Brinkley was formerly a foreign correspondent for the New York Times.]
As the congressional debt-reduction "super committee" begins work this week, it had better take into account trillions of dollars in anticipated war costs that no one in Washington seems willing to acknowledge.
For decades now (and probably much longer) government estimates of war costs strove not to count numerous secondary expenses that result from combat, like veterans’ health care – or the $20 billion wasted in Pakistan. Officials find the real numbers embarrassing. A recent Congressional Budget Office report, for example, placed the total costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars at $1.4 trillion, based solely on congressional appropriations specifically dedicated to those wars.
But a new academic study counts everything and puts the wars’ full price at about $4 trillion – almost all of it deficit spending. That’s nearly 30 percent of the nation’s $14 trillion debt. Even that, the study’s authors say, doesn’t include some costs that cannot be tallied, like those in the intelligence agencies’ "black" budgets, or the hundreds of millions in impromptu "death gratuities" paid to families of Americans and some foreigners killed in war.
The more disturbing finding, however, is that in the coming years the wars threaten to cost the nation another $2 trillion – in interest payments on war debt as well as continuing medical expenses for 150,000 wounded veterans.
No one in Washington is talking about that. Nobody wants to admit that these wars will end up costing $6 trillion or more – if all the troops were to come home right now. (That sum would pay the health-care costs for every single American for more than two years – or fund the federal government, in full, for a year and a half.)
Experts from more than a dozen universities and think tanks researched this new study, Costs of War Since 2001, under the auspices of the Eisenhower Study Group at Brown University. As the 10-year mark of the Afghan war approaches, the authors wrote, "it is appropriate" to "recall some of the costs we may have forgotten and to assess what has not been counted" along with consequent "opportunities lost, and possibilities foreclosed."
The congressional super committee is supposed to find $1.5 trillion in savings spread over the next 10 years. As they begin, they might want to consider that even if they reach their goal, new war costs will more than offset the savings.
There’s more:
While outside experts tally the costs, something the government refuses to do, federal auditors are continuing to find that if you turn over any rock in Iraq or Afghanistan, you’ll find tens of millions of dollars being wasted, stolen or otherwise misappropriated. In one new example, a Pentagon inspector general found that the Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan has allowed an insurance company to defraud it of $68.4 million.
In mid-August, a special U.S. military task force found that $360 million in reconstruction funds found its way into the hands of Taliban militants and other enemy forces. Unfortunately, all of that is simply business as usual for these two failed wars.
No matter what you might think about the justifications for starting the wars, it’s hard to argue that they are succeeding. Right now, those two nations the United States "saved" are two of the most corrupt nations on Earth, a corrosive problem that ripples down from presidential suites to the lowly street sweeper.
Justifications for both wars shifted as circumstances changed. But in both cases the United States tried to install a democracy. Now, Freedom House classifies both countries as "not free," on a par with Iran.
In Afghanistan, a primary goal right now is to train the army and police so they can stand up to the Taliban once coalition forces leave. Well, that Congressional Budget Office study cited the same problems that have plagued this effort for years, including "shortages of trainers, problems with corruption, absenteeism, illiteracy and most recently" an auditor’s report that said Defense Department trainers vastly overstate the Afghan soldiers’ "operational capabilities."
Another federal auditor’s report found that NATO trainers can’t even come up with an accurate count of the Afghan police force, raising the likelihood that more than 10,000 of the people receiving salaries are "ghost police" – millions of dollars more flushed down the toilet.
The United States has little to gain from continuing either war. They are mile-deep money pits. If the super committee wants to find trillions of dollars in savings, it should look there first.
6) Can Petraeus handle the CIA’s skepticism on Afghanistan?
David Ignatius, Washington Post, September 1
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/can-petraeus-handle-the-cias-skepticism-on-afghanistan/2011/09/01/gIQAb3ChuJ_story.html
When David Petraeus takes over as CIA director next week, he will confront a tricky problem: CIA analysts who will be working for him concluded in a recent assessment that the war in Afghanistan is heading toward a "stalemate" – a view with which Petraeus disagrees.
The analysts made their judgment in "District Assessment on Afghanistan," completed in July, the same month Petraeus quit his post as U.S. commander there. He disagrees with the analysts’ pessimistic reading, as does Gen. John Allen, the new commander in Kabul; Gen. James Mattis, the Centcom commander; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The CIA assessment is "pretty harsh," said a military official who is familiar with its contents. He noted that the document used the word "stalemate" several times to describe the standoff between NATO-led forces and Taliban insurgents. Even in areas where the United States has surged troops over the past 18 months to clear insurgents, the CIA analysts weren’t optimistic that the Taliban’s momentum had been reversed, as President Obama and his military commanders have argued.
"Everyone looking at Afghanistan today recognizes that the challenges are real and that progress isn’t easy," said a civilian official familiar with the assessment, adding that it was coordinated carefully with the military. This is the CIA’s seventh such district-by-district examination of the country.
The analysts’ skepticism about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, which has been deepening over the past several years, presents challenges for Petraeus and the White House.
The test for Petraeus will be whether he can give the analysts the independence they need to provide a sound evaluation of Afghanistan strategy, which he himself created. Petraeus has his own strong views about the war and has made clear that he will continue to say what he thinks. But if the analysts are taking a different view from the boss, there’s bound to be tension.
How Petraeus manages this inevitable friction – reassuring the analysts while remaining faithful to his own views – will be closely watched within and outside the CIA. This isn’t a military chain of command: Intelligence analysts resent efforts by outsiders (and even superiors) to shape their reporting. If they think Petraeus is trying to steer assessments, they’re sure to protest.
Petraeus maintained during his June 23 Senate confirmation hearing that he would give the analysts proper latitude in areas where he had been a commander, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. "In the Situation Room with the president, I will strive to represent the agency position," he said, adding that he would be "keenly aware that I am the leader of an intelligence agency, and not a policymaker."
Gossip about a supposed rift between Petraeus and the analysts has been circulating in Kabul during the past week, as word spread of the skeptical CIA assessment. Some speculated it was a preemptive strike by the agency bureaucracy; others saw it as a harbinger of impending change in White House policy. From my reporting, neither seems to be true. The analysts have long been skeptical on Afghanistan, but Obama has continued to support the military.
The larger challenge is for Obama. In 2009, he signed on to the limited objective of stopping al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and reversing the Taliban’s momentum – but using a broad counterinsurgency strategy to achieve that mission. If the CIA analysts’ view becomes widely shared, and there’s growing sentiment in Washington that the $100 billion-plus annual campaign is only buying an expensive stalemate, Obama will have to re-examine the plan and the troop levels.
[…]
Iraq
7) Iraq Calls For New Inquiry On Deaths In 2006 U.S. Raid
Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times, September 2, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/middleeast/03ishaqi.html
Baghdad – A spokesman for Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq said Friday that the government would reopen an investigation into a March 2006 raid in which American troops were accused of executing an Iraqi family.
The decision came two days after McClatchy Newspapers reported on its Web site that a diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks disclosed that a senior United Nations official had warned the United States government in 2006 that he had evidence indicating that American troops had executed the family in the town of Ishaqi.
The cable included a letter written by the United Nations official, Philip Alston. In it, he said that the autopsies of those killed during an assault on a house by American troops seeking an insurgent leader showed "that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed." In addition, he said, five of the victims were age 5 or younger.
That account and others provided by Iraqi security officials conflicted with the findings of an investigation by the American military, which concluded three months after the killings that the accusations of an execution were "absolutely false." The American inquiry acknowledged that the raid and a subsequent airstrike had led to civilian deaths.
An American military spokesman in Washington said Thursday that the information in the cable did not change the conclusions of the American investigation.
Mr. Maliki’s spokesman, Ali al-Moussawi, said, "We will not give up on enforcing the rights of the Iraqi people."
It is not clear how the Iraqi government could hold the American servicemembers accountable for the episode or whether the cable would have any effect on negotiations between the United States and Iraq over whether American troops will remain in the country after the end of the year.
Daham Muhammad, whose family was killed in the raid, said in a telephone interview on Friday that the cable provided additional evidence that his family had been executed.
[…]
Afghanistan
8) More Afghan soldiers deserting the army, NATO statistics show
Joshua Partlow, September 1, Saturday, September 3, 9:23 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia-pacific/more-afghan-soldiers-deserting-the-army/2011/08/31/gIQABxFTvJ_story.html
Kabul – At least one in seven Afghan soldiers walked off the job during the first six months of this year, according to statistics compiled by NATO that show an increase in desertion.
Between January and June, more than 24,000 soldiers walked off the job, more than twice as many as in the same period last year, according to the NATO statistics. In June alone, more than 5,000 soldiers deserted, nearly 3 percent of the 170,000-strong force.
Some Afghan officials say the figures point to the vulnerability of a long-standing Afghan policy that prohibits punishment of deserters. The rule, issued under a decree by President Hamid Karzai, was aimed to encourage recruiting and allow for some flexibility during harvest time, when the number of desertions spikes.
[…] As recently as September 2009, more Afghan soldiers had been quitting than joining the army, but that trend had been reversed by aggressive recruiting, salary increases and guarantees of regular leave.
[…] The attrition statistics since 2010 were provided by NATO’s training command in Kabul in response to a request by The Washington Post. The Afghan ministry of defense keeps its own statistics on attrition that are generally slightly lower than NATO’s but hew to the same trends. The Afghan government’s tallies include soldiers who return after being gone long enough to be considered deserters; NATO’s stats at this time do not.
[…]
Libya
9) Libyans Turn Wrath On Dark-Skinned Migrants
David D. Kirkpatrick, New York Times, September 4, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/world/africa/05migrants.html
Tripoli, Libya – As rebel leaders pleaded with their fighters to avoid taking revenge against "brother Libyans," many rebels were turning their wrath against migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, imprisoning hundreds for the crime of fighting as "mercenaries" for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi without any evidence except the color of their skin.
Many witnesses have said that when Colonel Qaddafi first lost control of Tripoli in the earliest days of the revolt, experienced units of dark-skinned fighters apparently from other African countries arrived in the city to help subdue it again. Since Western journalists began arriving in the city a few days later, however, they have found no evidence of such foreign mercenaries.
Still, in a country with a long history of racist violence, it has become an article of faith among supporters of the Libyan rebels that African mercenaries pervaded the loyalists’ ranks. And since Colonel Qaddafi’s fall from power, the hunting down of people suspected of being mercenaries has become a major preoccupation.
Human rights advocates say the rebels’ scapegoating of blacks here follows a similar campaign that ultimately included lynchings after rebels took control of the eastern city of Benghazi more than six months ago. The recent roundup of Africans, though, comes at a delicate moment when the new provisional government is trying to establish its credibility. Its treatment of the detainees is emerging as a pivotal test of both the provisional government’s commitment to the rule of law and its ability to control its thousands of loosely organized fighters. And it is also hoping to entice back the thousands of foreign workers needed to help Libya rebuild.
Many Tripoli residents – including some local rebel leaders – now often use the Arabic word for "mercenaries" or "foreign fighters" as a catchall term to refer to any member of the city’s large underclass of African migrant workers. Makeshift rebel jails around the city have been holding African migrants segregated in fetid, sweltering pens for as long as two weeks on charges that their captors often acknowledge to be little more than suspicion. The migrants far outnumber Libyan prisoners, in part because rebels say they have allowed many Libyan Qaddafi supporters to return to their homes if they are willing to surrender their weapons.
The detentions reflect "a deep-seated racism and anti-African sentiment in Libyan society," said Peter Bouckaert, a researcher with Human Rights Watch who visited several jails. "It is very clear to us that most of those detained were not soldiers and have never held a gun in their life."
In a dimly lighted concrete hangar housing about 300 glassy-eyed, dark-skinned captives in one neighborhood, several said they were as young as 16. In a reopened police station nearby, rebels were holding Mohamed Amidu Suleiman, a 62-year-old migrant from Niger, on allegations of witchcraft. To back up the charges, they produced a long loop of beads they said they had found in his possession.
[…]
Lebanon
10) Tribunal Concealed Evidence Al-Qaeda Cell Killed Hariri
Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service, Aug 31
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104943
Washington – In focusing entirely on the alleged links between four Hezbollah activists and the 2005 bombing that killed Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the indictment issued by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon earlier this month has continued the practice of the U.N investigation before it of refusing to acknowledge the much stronger evidence that an Al-Qaeda cell was responsible for the assassination.
Several members of an Al-Qaeda cell confessed in 2006 to having carried out the crime, but later recanted their confessions, claiming they were tortured.
However, the transcript of one of the interrogations, which was published by a Beirut newspaper in 2007, shows that the testimony was being provided without coercion and that it suggested that Al-Qaeda had indeed ordered the assassination.
But the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC) was determined to pin the crime either on Syria or its Lebanese ally Hezbollah and refused to pursue the Al-Qaeda angle.
Detlev Mehlis, the first head of UNIIIC, was convinced from the beginning that Syrian military intelligence and its Lebanese allies had carried out the bombing and went to extraordinary lengths to link Ahmed Abu Adas, who had appeared in a videotape claiming responsibility for the assassination for a previously unknown group, to Syrian intelligence.
Violating the general rule that investigators do not reveal specific witness testimony outside an actual courtroom, Mehlis described testimony from "a number of sources, confidential and otherwise", which he said "pointed to Abu Adas being used by Syria and Lebanese authorities as scapegoat for the crimes…."
Mehlis cited one witness who claimed to have seen Adas in the hallway outside the office of the director of Syrian intelligence in December 20O4, and another who said Adas had been forced by the head of Syrian military intelligence to record the video in Damascus 15 days before the assassination and was then put in a Syrian prison.
Mehlis quoted a third witness, Zouheir Saddiq, as saying that Adas had changed his mind about carrying out the assassination on behalf of Syrian intelligence "at the last minute" and had been killed by the Syrians and his body put in the vehicle carrying the bomb.
The Mehlis effort to fit the Adas video into his narrative of Syrian responsibility for the killing of Hariri began to fall apart when the four "false witnesses" who had implicated Syrian and Lebanese intelligence in the assassination, including Saddiq, were discredited as fabricators.
Meanwhile a major potential break in the case occurred when Lebanese authorities arrested 11 members of an Al-Qaeda terrorist cell in late December 2005 and early January 2006.
The members of the cell quickly confessed to interrogators that they had planned and carried out the assassination of Hariri, The Daily Star reported Jun. 6, 2008.
Obviously based in large part on the interrogation of the cell members, the Lebanese government wrote an internal report in 2006 saying that, at one point after the assassination, Ahmed Abu Adas had been living in the same apartment in Beirut as the "emir" of the Al- Qaeda cell, Sheik Rashid.
The full text of the report was leaked to Al Hayat, which published it Apr. 7, 2007.
[…] The testimony came from Faisal Akhbar, a Syrian carrying a Saudi passport who freely admitted being part of the Al-Qaeda cell. He testified that Khaled Taha, a figure the U.N. commission later admitted was closely associated with Adas, had told him in early January 2005 that an order had been issued for the assassination of Hariri, and that he was to go to Syria to help Adas make a video on the group’s taking responsibility for the assassination.
Akhbar recalled that Sheikh Rashid had told him in Syria immediately after the assassination that it had been done because Hariri had signed the orders for the execution of Al-Qaeda militants in Lebanon in 2004. Akbar also said he was told around Feb. 3, 2005 that a team of Lebanese Al-Qaeda had been carrying out surveillance of Hariri since mid-January.
Akhbar also told interrogators some details that were clearly untrue, including the assertion that Abu Adas had actually died in the suicide mission. That was the idea that the cell had promoted in a note attached to the videotape Adas made.
When challenged on that point, Akhbar immediately admitted that a youth from Saudi Arabia, who had been sent by Al-Qaeda, had been the suicide bomber. He acknowledged that Rashid had told him that, if detained, he was to inform the security services that he knew nothing about the subject of Abu Adas, and that he was to warn the other members of the cell to do likewise.
But the interrogator employed a trick question to establish whether Akhbar had actual knowledge of the assassination plot or not. He gave the Al-Qaeda cadre a list of 11 phone numbers, four of which were fake numbers, and asked him if he remembered which ones were used in the preparations for the assassination.
Akhbar immediately corrected the interrogator, saying there had only been seven numbers used in the preparations for the assassination, including the five members of the surveillance team. That response corresponded with the information the investigation had already obtained, and which had not been reported in the news media.
The response of UNIIIC, under its new chief, Belgian Serge Brammertz, to the unfolding of an entirely different narrative surrounding the assassination was to shift the focus away from the question of who were the actual perpetrators of the bombing.
In his March 2006 report, Brammertz said the "priority" of UNIIIC "is being given not to the team that carried out the assassination but to those who ‘enabled’ the crime".
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