Just Foreign Policy News
May 11, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
‘Budrus’ Shows ‘White Intifada’ Can Beat the Israeli Occupation
The documentary "Budrus," which shows how a Palestinian village in the West Bank defeated the Israeli occupation through nonviolent resistance, is now available on DVD. The widespread availability of this movie in the United States could not come at a more propitious time, because conditions are ripe for a "White Intifada" in the West Bank that would end the occupation through mass nonviolent resistance. Support for such a campaign in the U.S. would be crucial. It’s time to prepare the audience.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/budrus-documentary-white-intifada_b_860501.html
*Action: Urge your Rep. to co-sponsor the McGovern-Jones bill
Reps. McGovern and Jones have introduced a bill – HR 1735, the "Afghanistan Exit and Accountability Act" – requiring the President to: present Congress with a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan; report quarterly on the implementation of the plan for military withdrawal and the costs of continuing the war; report on the savings to taxpayers of ending the war in 6 months vs. continuing it for 5 years.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/hr1735
Washington Post: Time for New Home for 5th Fleet
In a strong editorial, the Washington Post denounces U.S. acquiescence in the crackdown in Bahrain. "By tolerating the repression it is endangering long-term U.S. interests, since the crackdown is likely to boomerang, sooner or later, against both the Bahraini and Saudi ruling families. The best way to protect American interests is to tell both regimes that a continued security relationship with the United States depends on an end to policies of sectarian repression and on the implementation of moderate reforms. Meanwhile, it’s time to start looking for a new home for the 5th Fleet."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/applying-pressure-on-bahrain/2011/05/09/AF3sV6bG_story.html
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The death of bin Laden and growing pressure from Congress to shrink the U.S. footprint and expense in Afghanistan have given new impetus to those within the Obama administration who favor a swift reduction of U.S. forces, the Washington Post reports.
Current expenditures of $10 billion a month are "fundamentally unsustainable" and the administration urgently needs to clarify both its mission and exit plan, Sen. Kerry said. Kerry questioned the administration’s "lack of clarity" on reconciliation talks with the Taliban and the outline of a political solution that top administration policymakers have said are among the top U.S. priorities this year.
"The president should not just withdraw an arbitrary number of troops," Sen. Lugar said. "Rather, he should put forward a new plan that includes a definition of success in Afghanistan based on the United States’ vital interests and a sober analysis of what is possible to achieve."
2) In Congress, a debate is getting under way over the underlying authority used by two successive administrations to wage the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorist organizations and their supporters, the New York Times reports. The House Armed Services Committee was expected to take up a defense authorization bill Wednesday that includes a new authorization for the government to use military force. The provision has set off an argument over whether it is a mere update – or a sweeping, open-ended expansion – of the power Congress granted to the executive branch in 2001.
3) Nearly six in 10 Americans think it is time for the war in Afghanistan to end, USA Today reports. A broad swath of Americans now agrees with the statement that the US "has accomplished its mission in Afghanistan and should bring its troops home." Just over one-third say instead that the USA "still has important work to do in Afghanistan and should maintain its troops there."
4) Congressional calls for a quick end to military operations in Afghanistan grew louder Monday when a bipartisan group in the House urged President Obama to immediately withdraw U.S. troops, The Hill reports. "The success of this mission does not change the reality that America still faces a determined and violent adversary. It does, however, require us to re-examine our policy of nation-building in Afghanistan," the lawmakers wrote to Obama in a Monday letter spearheaded by Reps. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).
5) The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week’s raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian reports. A former US official said the Pakistani protests of the past week were the "public face" of the deal. "We knew they would deny this stuff."
Israel/Palestine
6) A document obtained under freedom of information laws has disclosed
That Israel stripped thousands of Palestinians of their right to live in the West Bank over a 27-year period, forcing most of them into permanent exile abroad, the Guardian reports. Around 140,000 Palestinians who left to study or work had their residency rights revoked between 1967 and 1994. "The mass withdrawal of residency rights from tens of thousands of West Bank residents, tantamount to permanent exile from their homeland, remains an illegitimate demographic policy and a grave violation of international law," said Hamoked, an Israeli NGO that obtained the document.
The practice of revoking the residency rights of Palestinians in east Jerusalem has accelerated in recent years, the Guardian says. In 2008, more than 4,500 Palestinians had their east Jerusalem identity cards revoked, compared with 229 the previous year, according to the Association of Civil Rights in Israel.
Afghanistan
7) Two new reports addressing human rights issues in Afghanistan raise the question of whether the US military can be sure that it has killed, detained or made deals with the right people, the New York Times reports. A report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network challenges the accuracy of American intelligence used in what are known as targeted killings. The other report, by Human Rights First, examines the growing number of detainees and the legal rights accorded them at the detention facility in Parwan. "In the view of their families and communities, the United States is arbitrarily detaining people based on false intelligence," the report says.
8) Human rights groups say detainees at Parwan are being denied right to counsel and to review evidence against them, much of which is classified, the Los Angeles Times reports. The hearing system "fails to provide detainees with an adequate opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they are collaborating with insurgents and present a threat to U.S. forces," Human Rights First says.
Iran
9) Years of hyping the threat from Iran have created a political culture in Israel where active Israeli politicians can’t publicly adjust to the region’s new realities, writes Trita Parsi in Foreign Policy. This is the context in which former Israeli officials have played down threats that Israel would attack Iran.
Bahrain
10) Interviews from inside Bahrain tell of ransacked hospitals and of terrified medical staff beaten, interrogated and forced into signing false confessions, The Independent reports. Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the British Medical Association, said the government attacks on medical staff in Bahrain were unprecedented. "I don’t think we have seen it on this scale before."
Venezuela
11) The release of a "dossier" of Farc files supposedly seized by the Colombian government by the International Institute for Strategic Studies appears to be an attempt by hawks in the US and the UK to perpetuate, using "black propaganda", the failed policies of the Bush administration, Greg Grandin and Miguel Tinker Salas write in the Guardian. Impartial observers of the events surrounding the supposed capture of computer files from the Farc, and their subsequent revelation in the media, have long ago concluded that the files are highly dubious at best. The documents’ evidence of Venezuelan support for the Farc was so weak that OAS secretary general José Miguel Insulza told the US House subcommittee on western hemispheric affairs a month later that there was "no evidence" of such support or collusion. Even more damning for the Colombian military’s case were statements last year by General Douglas Fraser, head of the US Southern Command regarding the alleged Venezuela-Farc connection, and the laptop "revelations": "We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection," Fraser stated, adding, "I am skeptical."
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) With bin Laden dead, some escalate push for new Afghan strategy
Karen DeYoung and Scott Wilson, Washington Post, May 10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/bin-ladens-killing-requires-new-look-at-afghanistan-strategy-kerry-says/2011/05/10/AFWylfiG_story.html
The death of Osama bin Laden and growing pressure from Congress to shrink the U.S. footprint and expense in Afghanistan have given new impetus to those within the Obama administration who favor a swift reduction of U.S. forces, according to senior administration officials and leading lawmakers.
These members of the administration initially pressed for an approach that emphasized the targeted killing of insurgent leaders, rather than the broader, troop-heavy counterinsurgency strategy that President Obama ultimately embraced. They intend to argue in upcoming debates that the al-Qaeda leader’s demise is proof that counterterrorism is a more reliable and cost-effective tactic for the next phase of the nearly decade-old war.
Even before the death of bin Laden, the confluence of the national debt crisis, the 2012 election, and events on the ground had bolstered arguments that the administration’s plans to remake Afghanistan’s government and economy went too far beyond the goal of safeguarding U.S. security.
Current expenditures of $10 billion a month are "fundamentally unsustainable" and the administration urgently needs to clarify both its mission and exit plan, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said Tuesday.
A senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy insisted that "there will be no re-litigation" of the strategy that has brought 30,000 more U.S. troops and hundreds of additional U.S. diplomats to the war zone since early last year. "We’re on a clear path set by the president," the official said.
But the official said the killing of bin Laden "may have a significant effect going forward on the setting of milestones and the pace and slope" of the U.S. troop withdrawal scheduled to take place between July and the end of 2014.
Administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal thinking, emphasized that Obama and his national security team have not begun discussions on the withdrawal nor has the military made a recommendation.
At a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he chairs, Kerry said he did not advocate a "unilateral, precipitous withdrawal" of U.S. forces. But, he said, "I do think that we ought to be working towards achieving the smallest footprint possible."
Kerry is a longtime friend and former Senate colleague of Vice President Biden, who led the administration faction arguing that counterterrorism was a more reliable and cost-effective tactic against al-Qaeda. The senator from Massachusetts is often a leading indicator of administration thinking. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates – whose departments and personnel have carried out the counterinsurgency strategy – advised in favor of Obama’s ultimate decision.
"One threshold really needs to be both stated and restated as we consider the options," Kerry said. "And that is that it is fundamentally unsustainable to continue spending $10 billion a month on a massive military operation with no end in sight."
Kerry has played an active role in supporting the administration’s strategy and in helping keep Hamid Karzai, the often troublesome Afghanistan president, in line. But he questioned the administration’s "lack of clarity" on reconciliation talks with the Taliban and the outline of a political solution that top administration policymakers have said are among the top U.S. priorities this year.
"Looming large in front of us is the pregnant question: What is the political solution? We need to make our ultimate goals absolutely clear for the sake of the American people, Afghans, Pakistanis and everyone else who has a stake in the outcome," Kerry said.
The senior administration official said that it was not clear whether bin Laden’s death would cause the Taliban to separate from al-Qaeda. "But his death makes that more likely, which could give traction to reconciliation efforts between the Taliban and the Afghan government."
Lawmakers of both parties have expressed increasing impatience. "The question before us is whether Afghanistan is important enough to justify the lives and massive resources that are being spent there, especially given our nation’s debt crisis," Sen. Richard G. Lugar (Ind.), the senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee said at the hearing.
"The president should not just withdraw an arbitrary number of troops," Lugar said. "Rather, he should put forward a new plan that includes a definition of success in Afghanistan based on the United States’ vital interests and a sober analysis of what is possible to achieve," he said.
In the 10 days since bin Laden’s death, many legislators have called for the United States to speed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, beginning with Obama’s planned drawdown of an unspecified number of troops this summer.
[…] "What has been the U.S. administration’s primary argument for being in Afghanistan – the al-Qaeda threat – has now been diminished," said one Western diplomat in Kabul. "It will only strengthen the argument that you can now begin the military withdrawal."
2) After Bin Laden, U.S. Reassesses Afghan Strategy
Thom Shanker and Charlie Savage, New York Times, May 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/world/middleeast/11military.html
Washington – The killing of Osama bin Laden has set off a reassessment of the war in Afghanistan and the broader effort to combat terrorism, with Congress, the military and the Obama administration weighing the goals, strategies, costs and underlying authority for a conflict that is now almost a decade old.
Two influential senators – John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana – suggested Tuesday that it was time to rethink the Afghanistan war effort, forecasting the beginning of what promises to be a fierce debate about how quickly the United States should begin pulling troops out of the country.
"We should be working toward the smallest footprint necessary, a presence that puts Afghans in charge and presses them to step up to that task," Mr. Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said at a hearing. "Make no mistake, it is fundamentally unsustainable to continue spending $10 billion a month on a massive military operation with no end in sight."
Both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lugar, the committee’s senior Republican, said they remained opposed to a precipitous withdrawal.
Still, "the broad scope of our activities suggests that we are trying to remake the economic, political and security culture of Afghanistan – but that ambitious goal is beyond our power," Mr. Lugar said. "A reassessment of our Afghanistan policy on the basis of whether our overall geostrategic interests are being served by spending roughly $10 billion a month in that country was needed before our troops took out Bin Laden."
Inside the Pentagon, however, officials make the case that rather than using Bin Laden’s death as a justification for withdrawal, the United States should continue the current strategy in Afghanistan to secure additional gains and to further pressure the Taliban to come to the bargaining table for negotiations on political reconciliation.
And in Congress, a debate is getting under way over the underlying authority used by two successive administrations to wage the post-Sept. 11 fight against terrorist organizations and their supporters.
The House Armed Services Committee is expected to take up a defense authorization bill on Wednesday that includes a new authorization for the government to use military force in the war on terrorism. The provision has set off an argument over whether it is a mere update – or a sweeping, open-ended expansion – of the power Congress granted to the executive branch in 2001.
The new authorization to use military force against Al Qaeda was unveiled by the committee chairman, Representative Howard P. McKeon, Republican of California. The committee is scheduled to vote Wednesday on amendments to the bill.
The provision states that Congress "affirms" that "the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces," and that the president is authorized to use military force – including detention without trial – of members and substantial supporters of those forces.
That language, which would codify into federal law a definition of the enemy that the Obama administration has adopted in defending against lawsuits filed by Guantánamo Bay detainees, would supplant the existing military force authorization that Congress passed overwhelmingly on Sept. 14, 2001. It instead named the enemy as the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Critics of Mr. McKeon’s provision have reacted with alarm to what they see as an effort to entrench in a federal statute unambiguous authority for the executive branch to wage war against terrorists who are deemed associates of Al Qaeda but who lack a clear tie to the Sept. 11 attacks.
In a joint letter to Congress, about two dozen groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights – contended that the proposal amounted to an open-ended grant of authority to the executive branch, legitimizing an unending war from Yemen to Somalia and beyond.
"This monumental legislation – with a large-scale and practically irrevocable delegation of war power from Congress to the president – could commit the United States to a worldwide war without clear enemies, without any geographical boundaries" and "without any boundary relating to time or specific objective to be achieved," the letter warned.
But Mr. McKeon argued in a statement that the provision did nothing more than codify the Obama administration’s interpretation of its legal authority to address the threat of Al Qaeda in light of its splintering and evolution over the past decade.
"This bill does not expand the war effort," he said. "Instead, the legislation better aligns the old legal authorities used to detain and prosecute those intent on attacking America with the threats our country faces today."
[…]
3) Poll: With bin Laden dead, is it time to end war?
Susan Page, USA Today, May 10, 2011
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-05-10-Afghanistan-mission-bin-Laden-troops-poll_n.htm
Washington – Osama bin Laden’s demise may have shifted not only the military prospects for al-Qaeda abroad, but also the political landscape for President Obama at home.
The death of the terror network’s leader and an intensified debate about how to cut federal spending are fueling calls to accelerate the promised troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, declare victory and get out.
So with bin Laden finally gone, is it time for America’s longest war to end?
Nearly six in 10 Americans think so, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend. Assessments of how the decade-long war is going have improved a bit, compared with six weeks ago, and a broad swath of Americans now agrees with the statement that the United States "has accomplished its mission in Afghanistan and should bring its troops home."
Just over one-third say instead that the USA "still has important work to do in Afghanistan and should maintain its troops there."
"I kind of feel like Osama was a reason we had gone there in the first place," says Liz Calhoun, 35, a stay-at-home mom from Lakeville, Minn., who was called in one of two USA TODAY polls on the subject during the past 10 days. "Now that he’s dead, it’s an end."
[…] "I don’t think we should just leave them hanging," Calhoun, a Republican and the mother of two, says of the Afghans. Her timetable for a measured U.S. pullout? "Realistically, probably three to six months."
[…]
4) Bipartisan House group to Obama: Pull troops from Afghanistan now
Mike Lillis, The Hill, 05/09/11 07:44 PM ET
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/159927-bipartisan-house-group-to-obama-withdraw-troops-in-afghanistan-now
Congressional calls for a quick end to military operations in Afghanistan grew louder Monday when a bipartisan group in the House urged President Obama to immediately withdraw U.S. troops.
Lawmakers said the raid in Pakistan that netted Osama bin Laden proves that a focused approach to rooting out terrorists is more effective than a large military presence, and they urged Obama to shift the mission in Afghanistan from nation-building to counterintelligence.
They said the U.S. can’t justify the extensive cost of maintaining tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan given the death of the al Qaeda leader.
"The success of this mission does not change the reality that America still faces a determined and violent adversary. It does, however, require us to re-examine our policy of nation-building in Afghanistan," the lawmakers wrote to Obama in a Monday letter spearheaded by Reps. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).
"We believe it is no longer the best way to defend America against terror attacks, and we urge you to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan that are not crucial to the immediate national-security objective of combating al Qaeda."
Also endorsing the letter were GOP Reps. Walter Jones (N.C.), John Campbell (Calif.) and John Duncan Jr. (Tenn.), and Democratic Reps. John Garamendi (Calif.), Rush Holt (N.J.) and John Tierney (Mass.).
The push is the latest salvo from an unusual alliance of anti-war Democrats and fiscally conservative Republicans who have united behind an expedited withdrawal from Afghanistan following bin Laden’s death. After a global manhunt spanning more than a decade, the infamous 9/11 mastermind was killed last week by U.S. special forces in a covert raid north of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.
In a telephone interview Monday, Welch said bin Laden’s demise has allowed lawmakers skeptical of the nation-building approach "some space … to step back and be more open to a change in direction."
[…]
5) Osama bin Laden mission agreed in secret 10 years ago by US and Pakistan
US forces were given permission to conduct unilateral raid inside Pakistan if they knew where Bin Laden was hiding, officials say Declan Walsh, Guardian, Monday 9 May 2011 19.06 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/09/osama-bin-laden-us-pakistan-deal
Islamabad – The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week’s raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned.
The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials.
Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.
"There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him," said a former senior US official with knowledge of counterterrorism operations. "The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us."
The deal puts a new complexion on the political storm triggered by Bin Laden’s death in Abbottabad, 35 miles north of Islamabad, where a team of US navy Seals assaulted his safe house in the early hours of 2 May.
Pakistani officials have insisted they knew nothing of the raid, with military and civilian leaders issuing a strong rebuke to the US. If the US conducts another such assault, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani warned parliament on Monday, "Pakistan reserves the right to retaliate with full force."
Days earlier, Musharraf, now running an opposition party from exile in London, emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the raid, terming it a "violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan".
But under the terms of the secret deal, while Pakistanis may not have been informed of the assault, they had agreed to it in principle.
A senior Pakistani official said it had been struck under Musharraf and renewed by the army during the "transition to democracy" – a six-month period from February 2008 when Musharraf was still president but a civilian government had been elected.
Referring to the assault on Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, the official added: "As far as our American friends are concerned, they have just implemented the agreement."
The former US official said the Pakistani protests of the past week were the "public face" of the deal. "We knew they would deny this stuff."
[…]
Israel/Palestine
6) Israel stripped 140,000 Palestinians of residency rights, document reveals
Thousands of Palestinians who left the West Bank to work or study between 1967 and 1994 had residency rights revoked
Harriet Sherwood, Guardian, Wednesday 11 May 2011 13.00 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/11/israel-palestinians-residency-rights
Jerusalem – Israel stripped thousands of Palestinians of their right to live in the West Bank over a 27-year period, forcing most of them into permanent exile abroad, a document obtained under freedom of information laws has disclosed.
Around 140,000 Palestinians who left to study or work had their residency rights revoked between 1967 and 1994.
Those leaving the West Bank across the Allenby bridge border crossing to Jordan were required to deposit their identity documents with Israeli officials. In return they were given a card, valid for three years, which could be extended three times for an additional year. If they stayed abroad more than six months beyond the expiration of the card, Israel deemed them "NLRs" – no longer resident – and their right to return was revoked.
"The mass withdrawal of residency rights from tens of thousands of West Bank residents, tantamount to permanent exile from their homeland, remains an illegitimate demographic policy and a grave violation of international law," said Hamoked, an Israeli NGO that filed the freedom of information request.
Some of the 140,000 were later allowed to return, but an estimated 130,000 are still deemed NLRs. "I doubt there is a family in the West Bank that does not have a relative who lost their residency rights in this way," Dalia Kerstein of Hamoked said. Requests to extend residency rights while abroad nearly always went unanswered, she added.
Saeb Erekat, the former Palestinian chief negotiator whose brother lost his residency rights after leaving to study in the US, described the policy as a war crime. Israel was "engaging in a systematic policy of displacement … to change the demographic composition of the occupied Palestinian territories", he said in a statement.
"This policy should not only be seen as a war crime as it is under international law; it also has a humanitarian dimension. We are talking about people who left Palestine to study or work temporarily but who could not return to resume their lives in their country with their families."
The process began at the start of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and ended in 1994 when the Palestinian Authority was established under the Oslo accords.
However, the practice of revoking the residency rights of Palestinians in east Jerusalem has accelerated in recent years.
[…] In 2008, more than 4,500 Palestinians had their east Jerusalem identity cards revoked, compared with 229 the previous year, according to the Association of Civil Rights in Israel.
Richard Falk, an investigator for the United Nations human rights council, described this as "the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians … [which] can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of ethnic cleansing".
In a recent high-profile case, the Palestinian owner of a bookshop at the American Colony hotel in east Jerusalem is facing deportation after having lost his residency rights. Munther Fahmi, 56, who left Jerusalem in 1973 for 20 years, has since been given a series of tourist visas which will no longer be renewed. Among the signatories to a petition demanding he be allowed to stay are the authors Ian McEwan, Roddy Doyle and Orhan Pamuk.
Afghanistan
7) Murky Identities And Ties Hinder NATO’s Hunt For Afghan Insurgents, Report Says
Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, May 10, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/world/asia/11afghanistan.html
Kabul, Afghanistan – Two new reports addressing human rights issues in Afghanistan have raised questions about how NATO troops are conducting the war. Both reports center on a question that has vexed international forces since the war began: How can the military be sure it has killed, detained or made deals with the right people?
A report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network challenges the accuracy of American intelligence used in what are known as targeted killings, and makes a case study of the killing of an alleged Qaeda-affiliated operative in Takhar Province who was attacked by NATO jets as he traveled in a convoy through a rural area. The report offers evidence that NATO forces got the wrong man and that the insurgent commander they were seeking is alive in Pakistan – an interview with him is included in the report. [The public television program Frontline also addressed the case in this segment of its program "Kill/Capture."]
However, NATO officials stand by their account and the intelligence it was based on, and insist that they got the man they were seeking, Mohammed Amin.
[…] The other report, by Human Rights First, examines the growing number of detainees and the legal rights accorded them at the detention facility in Parwan, which replaced the detention area at Bagram air base. As of April 23, the Parwan facility housed 1,750 detainees, according to Cmdr. Pamela Kunze, a spokeswoman for the American military’s detention operations here.
The report notes a number of improvements in detention operations, but emphasizes that many detainees insist they were taken into custody based on false intelligence and that they take that view back to their villages when released. Detainees remain unable to see much of the evidence used to apprehend them or hold them for unlimited periods of time.
"In the view of their families and communities, the United States is arbitrarily detaining people based on false intelligence," the report says.
Underpinning both reports is the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about whether people are who they say. It is a problem faced by foreigners working here, whether as diplomats, aid workers, journalists or human rights workers. The United States government and other countries’ governments have repeatedly entered into contracts with corrupt people and paid off rights abusers thinking they were legitimate actors.
[…] The incident recounted in the Afghanistan Analysts report occurred on Sept. 2. NATO jets bombed a convoy carrying the man who was alleged to be working with the Taliban in Takhar Province.
The bombs killed him and killed or wounded 8 to 12 others, believed to be insurgents, according to a NATO statement at the time.
Within hours it became clear that at least one person in the convoy was a candidate for Parliament, who was wounded. He insisted that the other people in the convoy were campaign workers accompanying him to three village rallies. NATO’s target was his uncle, who was helping to support his campaign, he said. The government of President Hamid Karzai and the local provincial government said much the same.
The report by Afghanistan Analysts traces the uncle’s life, in which he fought at various times on different sides and was captured and tortured by different groups. But in the period before his death, he was living peacefully in Kabul. According to the report, NATO asserted that a Taliban leader active in Takhar, whom the man knew, used his name as an alias, adding a further layer of confusion and leaving the overall sense that a number of players have such shifting allegiances and identities that it may be nearly impossible to make accurate judgments about them.
8) Review Board Decides Fates At Afghan Jail
Rights groups say conditions at the Parwan detention center are a vast improvement over the old Bagram prison. But they complain the release hearings violate rights to counsel and to review evidence.
Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2011
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghanistan-detainees-20110511,0,258728.story
Bagram air base, Afghanistan – The teenager in the white prayer cap and prison uniform with a number scrawled across the front in black marker took his place on the stand, absentmindedly biting his lip. "You are advised," the court reporter said as an interpreter repeated in Dari, "that this is not a criminal trial."
The detainee was among those at the Parwan detention facility, the central prison for suspected insurgents captured by NATO forces. The $60-million center, near Bagram air base about 25 miles north of Kabul, the capital, houses more than 1,800 detainees, almost triple the number since 2008.
Under the law of armed conflict, prisoners are entitled to a release hearing before a detainee review board of three U.S. military officials every six months. The board, along with the prison commander, determines whether prisoners remain behind bars, get transferred to the Afghan criminal justice system or are set free.
So far this year, a team of military and legal officials at Bagram has held 1,200 detainee release hearings, 200 in April alone, as more suspects are rounded up during North Atlantic Treaty Organization offensives. They expect to hold 4,000 by year’s end, compared with 2,300 last calendar year, so many they have had to add a third hearing room.
The majority of detainees remain in U.S. custody, about 63%, while about 30% are referred to the Afghan court system for prosecution and the rest are released.
Human rights officials acknowledge that conditions at the detention center are a vast improvement over the old Bagram prison, a converted Soviet aircraft hangar where prisoners were held in cages and U.S. troops were court-martialed in connection with the 2002 deaths of two detainees.
But they complain that the release hearings violate detainees’ right to counsel and to review evidence against themselves – much of which is classified. After officials from the New York-based nonprofit group Human Rights First visited Parwan this year, they alleged that they had met with detainees who had been held at the facility for years, some even after they had been cleared for release.
"We deal with classified evidence in the U.S. all the time and there’s ways of dealing with that, to declassify portions and make it usable," said Daphne Eviatar, a senior associate with the rights group and author of a scathing report released Tuesday based on observation of seven hearings and interviews with 18 former detainees.
The hearing system "fails to provide detainees with an adequate opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they are collaborating with insurgents and present a threat to U.S. forces," the report says. "Former detainees we interviewed repeatedly emphasized that they believed they were wrongly imprisoned based on false information provided to U.S. forces by personal, family or tribal enemies."
Rights advocates worry that Parwan’s system is becoming an unjust model for U.S. detention policy, particularly after President Obama ordered the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to adopt the same types of review board procedures in March. Military officials defend the Parwan model, and insist that representatives assigned to detainees can review classified evidence, ensuring that detainees receive fair hearings and are released in a timely manner.
[…]
Iran
9) Freeing Israel from its Iran bluff
Trita Parsi, Foreign Policy, Wednesday, May 11, 2011
http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/11/freeing_israel_from_its_iran_bluff
One of the great bluffs in the foreign policy community in the previous decade was that Israel would have no choice but to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities unless Washington stepped up and took military action first. With predictable frequency since the mid-1990s, reports emerged claiming that Israel was months, if not weeks, away from bombing Iran. And every time a new dire warning was issued, a new rationale was presented to convince the world that the latest Israeli warning was more serious than the previous one. The Israeli threats, however, were bluffs all along. Israel did not have the capacity to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the huffing and puffing ensured that the American military option remained on the table; that Washington would not deviate from the Israeli red line of rejecting uranium enrichment on Iranian soil; and that the Iranian nuclear program was kept at the top of the international community’s agenda.
But the persistent bluffing also carried a price. The Israeli narrative on Iran has grown increasingly alarmist, desperate, and existential over the past 15 years. Inflating the Iranian threat served several purposes domestically. It provided Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres a rationale to push for peace with the Palestinians in the 1990s, while more recently Benjamin Netanyahu has used it to resist pressure from Washington to do just that. But the domestic benefits came at the price of limiting Israel’s options and flexibility vis-à-vis Iran. As Israeli politicians built up the Iranian threat and established a near-consensus that Tehran constituted an existential threat, it became increasingly difficult for any Israeli politician to walk back the threat depiction without losing critical political capital at home. As a result, there was a steady escalation of the threat depiction from Iran and no clear ways to de-escalate.
I wrote about this in the Forward in late 2007, pointing out that Israel was suffering from strategic paralysis due to its inability to adjust to the region’s new realities and walk back its alarmist position on Iran. Today, Israel’s strategic position in the region is at even greater risk. In the past few years, for instance, tensions have steadily increased between Israel and Turkey with the friction reaching a boiling point after the Gaza flotilla incident in 2010. As a result, the strategic alliance with Turkey seems to be lost for the foreseeable future. Now, with the fall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Israel has lost its most important Arab ally. Thus, the cost of the strategic paralysis is greater today than it was even a few years ago.
Against this backdrop, statements by both Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan in the past few days have stirred the political pot in Israel and made headlines worldwide. Speaking at a conference in Jerusalem, Dagan said that bombing Iran’s nuclear installations would be "a stupid idea," adding that military action might not achieve all of its goals and could lead to a long war. Numerous Israeli officials have derided him for undercutting the pressure on Iran.
Yet, Dagan is not the first Israeli to contradict the official Israeli line shortly after leaving office. His predecessor at the Mossad, Efrahim Halevi, challenged a related Israeli talking point on Iran after having retired — the idea that the Iranians are irrational and as a result neither containment nor diplomacy can be pursued. "I don’t think they are irrational, I think they are very rational. To label them as irrational is escaping from reality, and it gives you kind of an escape clause," he told me in 2006.
Similarly, on the eve of his departure from political life, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert delivered a stinging parting shot in 2008 questioning the feasibility of an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Olmert told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that Israel had lost its "sense of proportion" when stating that it would deal with Iran militarily. "What we can do with the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese, we cannot do with the Iranians," Olmert said. "Let’s be more modest, and act within the bounds of our realistic capabilities," he cautioned.
[…]
Bahrain
10) Blindfolded, beaten and tortured: grim new testimony reveals fate of Bahrain’s persecuted doctors
Horrifying evidence sheds light on brutality of state crackdown on medical staff.
Jeremy Laurance, The Independent, Tuesday, 10 May 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/blindfolded-beaten-and-tortured-grim-new-testimony-reveals-fate-of-bahrains-persecuted-doctors-2281616.html
Harrowing testimony of torture, intimidation and humiliation from a doctor arrested in the crackdown on medical staff in Bahrain has revealed the lengths to which the regime’s security forces are prepared to go to quash pro-democracy protests.
Interviews obtained by The Independent from inside Bahrain tell of ransacked hospitals and of terrified medical staff beaten, interrogated and forced into signing false confessions. Many have been detained, their fate unknown.
Inspired by the pro-democracy protests which swept Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year, Bahrainis took to the streets in their thousands in February, demanding greater political rights and more equality for the Shia Muslim majority, ruled over for decades by a Sunni monarchy.
The state launched a fierce counter-offensive in mid-March, swiftly and brutally crushing the uprising with the backing of Saudi security forces.
The campaign of intimidation against the doctors and nurses who bore witness to the bloody crackdown began two months ago at Salmaniya Medical Complex, the main hospital in the capital Manama. It has since been extended to at least nine health centres which have been systematically attacked by the security forces over the past month, an activist cataloguing the abuses says.
Each incident follows the same pattern: police jeeps surround the centre, before armed men and women in masks close the gates and line all those caught inside up against the wall.
Police dogs are also used to spread fear among the staff. Though it is impossible to corroborate the accounts, they correspond with others emerging from Bahrain and from reports by international monitoring groups.
The latest crackdown followed protests by doctors at the refusal by the regime to allow ambulances from Salmaniya Hospital to attend to those injured in the protests.
Details of the assaults, collected by the families of those detained and passed to The Independent, show that at least 40 medical staff were arrested in nine health centres between 10 April and 27 April. Dr Ahmed Jamal, president of the Bahrain Medical Society, was arrested at his clinic on 2 May.
Among 11 female doctors and nurses arrested, eight were released on 4 May but three remain detained, including Rula Jasim al-Saffar, 49, president of the Bahrain Nursing Society who has been held in custody for five weeks.
One consultant and family physician described in an email how she had been beaten, abused and humiliated and left with a black eye and bruises on her back during a seven-hour detention at the Central Province Police centre. Fearing for the safety of her children, she asked to remain anonymous.
She was sworn at, called a "dirty Shia" and a "whore", beaten with a thick hose and forced to sing the national anthem, she said.
At one point she was blindfolded and made to run down a corridor until she banged into a wall.
Her assailants alleged she had protested against the regime, and hit her when she denied it. She was released after signing a document admitting she had protested against the Health Minister.
The doctor believes she was targeted because she is the wife of a prominent surgeon who has been held in custody since being arrested in mid-operation more than a month ago "While I thank God I have been reunited with my children, I am even more fearful for the well-being of my husband, knowing the torture that I endured," she wrote.
She said that another female doctor detained with her had been unable to sing the national anthem when ordered to do so because her throat was too dry.
"The interrogators gave her a tiny sip of water and told her to stick out her tongue. She was blindfolded and when she put her tongue out, one of the officers suddenly stabbed it with a pen. Then they told her to sit on a chair because she felt dizzy.
"When she went to sit, they pulled the chair away and she fell to the ground. Then they threw the chair at her and it landed on top of head. They told her not to remove the chair from her head."
Relatives of those detained said some were forced to confess to acts they had not committed, with those confessions filmed by the security forces for subsequent broadcast.
The daughter of one doctor said: "They were made to confess that they gave treatment only to Shia protesters and not to Sunnis, stole blood from the hospital to splatter on protesters to make the situation seem more dramatic, and that they encouraged others to protest against the regime."
Rights activists say medical officials have been targeted because they bore witness to the terrible injuries sustained by the protesters they treated, and could therefore give evidence against the government.
Forty-seven doctors and nurses were charged last week with "promoting efforts to bring down the government" and "harming the public by spreading false news". Their trials are expected to begin shortly.
Vivienne Nathanson, head of ethics at the British Medical Association, said the attacks on medical staff in Bahrain were unprecedented. "I don’t think we have seen it on this scale before. It is very worrying because doctors and health workers have an ethical duty to treat people regardless of what they have been doing and the state has an obligation to protect them. All the doctors have been doing is saying these people need care and they have got to give care. They are not saying the protesters are right," she said.
[…]
Venezuela
11) What the Farc files really reveal
A conservative thinktank’s attempt to reheat widely discredited Colombian military claims about Farc is pure black propaganda
Greg Grandin and Miguel Tinker Salas, Guardian, Tuesday 10 May 2011 20.30 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/10/farc-files-colombia-venezuela
The release Tuesday of a "dossier" of Farc files, which were supposedly seized by the Colombian government in 2008, is truly a non-event. The report, by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), appears to be an attempt by hawks in the US and the UK to perpetuate, using "black propaganda", the failed policies of the George W Bush administration, as well as previous administrations of the cold war era, to which they respectively once belonged. All of its conclusions are based on the false premise that the documents that it claims to analyse are entirely trustworthy.
Impartial observers of the events surrounding the supposed capture of computer files from the Farc, and their subsequent revelation in the media, have long ago concluded that the files are highly dubious at best. The Colombian military, which claims to have obtained the documents from computers and flash drives following an illegal bombing raid on a Farc camp inside Ecuador in March 2008, is the only party that can know for sure whether the documents are authentic.
The IISS, and others who want the world to believe in the documents’ authenticity, rest much of their case on the supposed verification of the files by Interpol. But what Interpol actually said, in its 2008 report on the documents, was that the Colombian military’s treatment of the files "did not conform to internationally recognised principles for the ordinary handling of electronic evidence by law enforcement". Interpol noted that there was a one-week period between the computer documents’ capture by Colombia, and when they were handed over to Interpol, during which time the Colombian authorities actually modified 9,440 files, and deleted 2,905, according to Interpol’s detailed forensic report. This "may complicate validating this evidence for purposes of its introduction in a judicial proceeding", Interpol noted at the time.
Following their remarkable initial "discovery" and "capture" (the computers, we were told, survived a bombing raid completely unscathed), the Colombian military made "revelations" that quickly turned out to be false. A photo depicting a high-level Ecuadorian official meeting with the Farc was revealed to be a fake. Even more embarrassing, the Colombian military’s claims that files showed the Farc were planning to make a "dirty bomb" were publicly dismissed by the US government and terrorism experts.
The documents’ evidence of Venezuelan support for the Farc was so weak that Organisation of American States secretary general José Miguel Insulza told the US House subcommittee on western hemispheric affairs just a month later that there was "no evidence" of such support or collusion.
Even more damning for the Colombian military’s case were statements last year by General Douglas Fraser, head of the US Southern Command, in response to questions from Senator John McCain, regarding the alleged Venezuela-Farc connection, and the laptop "revelations": "We have not seen any connections specifically that I can verify that there has been a direct government-to-terrorist connection," Fraser stated, adding, "I am skeptical." (Fraser recanted his testimony the following day, following a meeting with the top state department official for Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela. But Fraser, as the US military’s leader for activities in South America, is in a much better position to know.)
But perhaps most telling of all are the current close relations between the governments of Venezuela and Colombia, now that Juan Manuel Santos has taken over from Alvaro Uribe as president of Colombia. If Colombia, indeed, had evidence of Venezuelan support for the Farc, would Santos have so readily warmed to the Chávez administration, quickly boosting trade and political support? Santos, interestingly, is the man who, as Colombia’s defence minister, oversaw the raid on the Farc camp.
US policy, during much of the Uribe administration (2002-2010), seemed designed to provoke tension between Colombia and Venezuela. Now, with Santos in office, and Colombia "looking ahead" and even dropping a Uribe era agreement stipulating an increased US military presence in Colombia, promoters of this policy are again hoping to stir up trouble, through the IISS.
The world is being asked to trust the word of former Bush administration intelligence officials and national security advisers – who help to oversee IISS’s activities – and their counterparts in the UK, who include former advisers to Blair and Thatcher. The IISS expert chosen to present the dossier’s findings this week in Washington, for example, is a former British intelligence officer who conducted intelligence operations in Latin America. Other notable IISS advisory council members include Robert D Blackwill (former deputy national security adviser to George W Bush), Eliot Cohen (formerly secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s senior adviser on strategic issues), Sir David Manning (formerly foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair) and Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. In other words, some of the same people who deceived the people of the United States and the United Kingdom into invading Iraq now want us to believe their "revelations" about Venezuela, Ecuador and the Farc.
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