Elsewhere Today (406)
Aljazeera:
Israel withdraws from Lebanon
Sunday 01 October 2006, 4:38 Makka Time, 1:38 GMT
The Israeli army has completed its withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Israeli security sources have said.
Israeli security sources said that the last Israeli tanks and troops left through the border post of Zarit - close to where two Israeli soldiers were abducted by Hezbollah fighters in a cross-border raid on July 12 - early on Sunday.
The final phase of the withdrawal began late on Saturday, just before Yom Kippur - the holiest day in the Jewish calendar - which started at dusk on Sunday.
Commenting on the withdrawal, Lebanese officials said that Major-General Alain Pellegrini, the commander of the UN peacekeepers in Lebanon, had informed Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, that Israel planned to complete its withdrawal by Sunday.
Israel had already pulled out most of the 10,000 troops who entered Lebanon during the 34-day war and only a few hundred remained by the weekend.
A UN resolution led to a ceasefire that took hold on August 14.
Around 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 157 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed in the worst fighting since Israel's invasion in 1982. Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation.
Israeli television said that despite the ground pull-out Israel would "retain the right" to overfly Lebanese territory and to patrol Lebanon's coast. It said that Hezbollah was not fully observing UN resolutions.
Major Zvika Golan, an Israeli army spokesman, said: "The responsibility for Lebanon right now is in the hands of the Lebanese government and, of course, the UN so every act of Hezbollah is the responsibility of Lebanon."
Reuters
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/2DCD096B-88EA-4FFE-B6CF-BFB06F462789.htm
allAfrica:
PDP Edges Out Atiku
By Bolaji Adebiyi And Oke Epia, Lagos/Abuja
This Day (Lagos) NEWS
September 29, 2006
Vice President Atiku Abubakar's presidential ambition dimmed further yesterday as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) suspended him for three months, effectively shutting him out of the party's presidential primaries fixed for December 16.
By the decision of the party's National Executive Committee (NEC) yesterday, the Vice President will lose all his rights and privileges in the party, including eligibility to contest for the presidential flag, as his suspension will lapse on December 29, 13 days after the primaries.
But Atiku in a swift reaction through his campaign organisation, Atiku Abubakar Campaign Organisation, dismissed his suspension as a ruse and an illegality that had violated the order of a court of law.
The PDP's national executive committee, which also announced the dates for its congresses and national convention said it suspended the Vice President in order to allow the party "confront the moral burden," which the reports of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Federal Government Administrative Panel of Inquiry had placed on its doorstep.
The NEC consequently fixed the gubernatorial congresses and presidential convention for December 9 and 16 respectively while party congresses at the Ward level are slated for November 4; House of Assembly November 18; House of Representatives, November 25; and Senatorial, December 2.
The party's candidates for the various levels of elections in 2007 will be elected at these congresses and convention.
Announcing the measure against Abubakar yesterday, PDP National Secretary, Chief Ojo Maduekwe, said the action was taken by the National Executive Committee (NEC) after noting the VP's anti-party activities, "his actions and utterances which continue to tear the party apart, bring it to disrepute, contempt and public odium;" and his indictment by the EFCC and FG panel reports as well as the decisions of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) on the reports. Maduekwe said NEC had since April 13, 2006, taken note of Abubakar's anti-party activities which included "advancing the cause of those fringe groups that call themselves opposition parties," and that all attempts to make him clear himself were rebuffed by him.
According to the national secretary, "Invitations extended to him were ignored. Instead, the actions and utterances of the Vice President have remained inconsistent with party ethics, direction, discipline, morale and this has continued to tear the party apart.
"In the wake of the recent indictment of the Vice President by the EFCC and the Administrative Panel of Inquiry, the NWC at its 127th meeting held on September 14, 2006 invited the Vice President to appear before it on September 19, 2006 for preliminary hearing in conformity with Article 21 of the Party Constitution."
He said instead of honouring the invitation the Vice President wrote through his lawyers (Ricky Tarfa & Co.) that it would be subjudice for him to honour it because the subject and issues of the invitation touched squarely on a subject and issues before the Federal High Court, Abuja.
"For this reason, the Vice President shunned the invitation. The doctrine of subjudice was being wrongly applied as a fig leaf to cover embarrassing ethical issues," Maduekwe said, adding, "NEC, therefore, noted: the anti-party activities of Vice President Atiku Abubakar; His actions and utterances, which continue to tear the party apart, bring it to disrepute, contempt and public odium; The indictment of the Vice President by an EFCC Report, the Administrative Panel of Inquiry report and the decisions of the FEC on the reports led to the approval by NEC of the suspension of the Vice President from the party for three months in order to confront the moral burden which the EFCC Report has placed at the doorstep of the ruling party."
He said the process of cleaning up the polity had gone too far to be abandoned, adding, "The arrow has left the bow, too late to be recalled. We have a challenge to lay a solid foundation for growth and development built on public and personal ethics, fairness, justice, transparency and judicious use of resources."
The NEC meeting ratified the decision of the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party to provide waivers on the two-year membership eligibility criteria thereby allowing those that just joined to contest for its ticket at the primaries and congresses. According to Maduekwe, NEC "considered the expression of interest from people aspiring for presidential and other elective offices and the massive decampment of members of other political parties to the PDP like those from Jigawa, Borno as well as prominent individuals like the former ANPP Chairman, Chief Don Etiebet.
"In the case of Jigawa, an entire state government walked into the warm embrace of PDP through the front door. PDP, therefore, approved the waiver for His Excellency, Alhaji. Saminu Turaki, to stand election on the platform of the party and approved that NWC issue waiver to other deserving presidential aspirants on merit."
The meeting "agreed to propose" an amendment to Article 12(77) and 12(80) of the PDP constitution, which deals on the criteria for the chairmanship of the Board of Trustees (BOT).
By the amendment, which Maduekwe said will be presented to the National Convention of the party for approval and ratification, will ensure that future Chairmen of the BOT "shall be from the ranks of former Presidents of the Federal Republic of Nigeria produced by the party or in the absence of such; a former National Chairman of the party who has distinguished himself in the service of the party; person of proven integrity who has contributed immensely to the growth of the party."
By the new arrangement, "the functions of the BOT shall be carried out through its chairman," as part of the move to strengthen the board "through a strengthened chairman as the conscience of the party and its guide on diplomacy, policies and programme implementation" and also "to improve the synergy between government and party so vital for continuity of the reform programme and other transformational policy."
According to the national secretary, the NEC meeting also approved the removal of "certain unnecessary phrases from the clauses in Article 13(4)(a) and (b) of the party constitution dealing with the functions of the National Secretary."
Reacting to these developments yesterday, the Vice President described his suspension as an affront on the Nigerian judiciary, which had granted an injunction restraining the party from taking any disciplinary action against him and the Governor of Adamawa State, Mr. Boni Haruna.
According to a statement by the spokesman of the Atiku Abubakar Campaign organisation, Dr. Adeolu Akande, the Vice President said the PDP was aware that a competent court had in May this year restrained the party from taking any disciplinary action against him until a suit he filed against the party was decided.
He described the reason given by for his suspension as spurious, illogical and of no consequence.
The Vice President said he had challenged the EFCC and the administrative panel reports, which indicted him in court and wandered why the party could not wait for the cases to be decided by the court before rushing to suspend him.
"The PDP action is part of an evil plot to stop me from contesting the 2007 presidential election. By the grace of God, such sinister plot will fail," he said, adding, "It is most unfortunate, tragic and odious that the PDP is taking action on a matter, which is the subject of litigation."
The party's decision, he said, was another evidence of the "illegality, recklessness and arrogant misuse of power" by the President and the PDP. Despite his travails, he said would remain unruffled, stating that he would continue to fight his cause through all legal means available to him.
Atiku said: "History will judge all of us. The destruction of our institutions and values in pursuit of petty personal interest as well as egomaniac domination of our political space will fail just as the life presidency project failed woefully."
He called on his supporters to remain calm and be law abiding, noting that nothing would stop him from serving out his term as elected Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
In a related development, the Chief Solomon Lar faction of the PDP yesterday said it had suspended the President, Chairman of the party, Dr. Ahmadu Ali, and Maduekwe for anti-party activities that were promoting anarchy in the land.
In a statement signed by the Chairman of the Interim management Committee, Alhaji Ibrahim Iro-Safana, the faction said the decision was taken after an emergency NEC meeting in Abuja yesterday.
Copyright © 2006 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
http://allafrica.com/stories/200609290062.html
AlterNet:
Sayonara to Checks and Balances?
By Aziz Huq, HuffingtonPost.com
Posted on September 30, 2006
"Checks and balances" has a nice ring. But it's a currency that doesn't go a long way in Washington today.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, of MCA, passed by the House and Senate is a wholesale assault on the idea of a limited government under law.
It will be taken by the Bush Administration as a blank check to torture, to detain indefinitely without just cause, and to trample the values that win America respect in the world. From tomorrow, counter-terrorism is the "land of do as you please" for the President and the wise men of the Defense Department - those savants who brought you Iraq, the gift that keeps on giving (at least if you're a jihadist).
The MCA comprehensively assaults two ideas: The idea of checking executive power by laws. And the idea of a separate branch of government ensuring those limits are respected. These are the basic tools of accountability. The MCA frontally attacks both of these - although only time will tell whether it succeeds.
How does the Military Commissions Act assail checks and balances? Consider the key issues of detention and torture.
The MCA says nothing explicit about the detention power. Indeed, I would argue that nothing in the legislation ought to be read to imply
Here's how the Addington play for detention power will work. The opening definition of the Act describes elaborately what an "unlawful enemy combatant" is. Why? The term is a neologism. The laws of war do not use or define this term. Indeed, it is a mutation of a phrase used in a subordinate clause of a 1942 Supreme Court opinion. Nothing else in the Act directly turns on this definition-although only an "alien unlawful enemy combatant" can be subject to trial by military commission. So why bother with the elaborate definition? And why extend the definition to U.S. citizens as well as non-citizens?
Back in 2004, the Supreme Court, in the now well-known Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision, stated that an "enemy combatant" captured in hostilities could be held for the duration of those hostilities. The Court made very clear it was talking about only the limited context of the ground war in Afghanistan, not some amorphous and unending "war on terror." But Addington et al. will, however, take Hamdi's sanction of detention-and extend it far, far beyond Hamdi. It will be a detention power that applies anywhere and anytime.
There are two ways in which you - citizen or non-citizen, resident of Topeka or Timbuktu - can become an "unlawful enemy combatant."
The first way is if you engage "n hostilities" or "purposefully and materially support" hostilities. This sounds reasonable enough until you realize that no-one has the slightest clue what it means to "purposefully and materially support" hostilities. Do you need to intend to aid the hostilities? Or is it enough to intend to give the support? Would purposely giving to a charity that then gave money to Hamas count, even if you knew nothing about the Hamas? What about writing an editorial that gave "aid and comfort" to the enemy - say, by criticizing the Administration's Iraq policy?
The second way is - if it's even possible - more dangerous: You are designated an enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal - the Potemkin proceedings jerry-rigged at Guantánamo - or you are designated by "another competent tribunal" created by the Defense Secretary.
It's the latter that catches in the throat, because the MCA does not define what Rumsfeld's "competent tribunal" must look like. Rummy himself with the always-fair-and-impartial Addington? Five Syrian torturers (like the ones to whom the U.S. sent the hapless Canadian Maher Arar)? A bunch of guys who flip coins for your liberty? Sure, why not? The MCA doesn't stop the executive from using any of these, provided Rumsfeld gave them power and hence made them "competent."
At least for non-citizens, moreover, that would be that: For the first time in U.S. history, an Act of Congress singles out a group of persons-non-citizens-and deprives them of any right to challenge their detention wherever they are picked up. No non-citizen would, the MCA seems to say, be able to challenge this detention. And while citizens are certainly entitled to a hearing, the Government will fight tooth and nail to make sure this hearing doesn't allow any effective inquiry into the facts on which a detention is based. So no judicial review - and no accountability.
The same dynamic is at play in the anti-torture rules. The MCA alters a criminal statute called the War Crimes Act, which imposed criminal sanctions for certain violations of the laws of war.
Until recently, the United States could proudly point to a long history of supporting a universal ban on torture, and to a strong record in ensuring that those who in fact tortured did not escape accountability. No longer. Now a gamut of horrendous kinds of treatment will be non-criminal - and, the Bush Administration will argue, within the discretion of the President.
Start with the substantive anti-torture rules themselves (which cover both torture and the lesser "cruel and inhuman" treatment). The MCA contains an incredibly complex and convoluted set of definitions. Despite all the cant about clarity, the rules no longer in plain English - as they were in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions - and they are so full of holes they might have been tortured themselves.
Here are three examples of the duplicitous ambiguity of the MCA when it comes to torture and abuse.
First, "cruel and inhuman" treatment is defined as acts that cause "severe or serious" pain. We know "severe" is worse than "serious" because "severe" is used to define torture (yes, we'll get there in a moment). But then "serious pain" is defined as "bodily injury" that causes "extreme physical pain." So "serious" pain is only "extreme" pain? Isn't extreme worse than serious? It would seem so-but the MCA is deliberately confusing and circular.
And why the reference to bodily injury? Does that mean that hypothermia and long-time standing and those other wretched "enhanced" techniques more fitting for Stalin's gulags than American facilities are not criminal? Well, yes, I reckon it does.
Second, in another convoluted section, "serious mental pain" is defined in terms of "non-transitory" harms. Thus, if a CIA agent threatens to kill a detainee, or to rape his spouse and his children - all long-recognized as forms of torture - that's not torture; it's not even the lesser "cruel and inhuman" treatment.
Finally, the torture statute itself. Almost unnoticed, the Bush Administration has gutted the no-torture rule. It has added the requirement that a person "specifically" intend to cause the pain that amounts to torture. This technical change-foreshadowed in the August 2002 OLC memo - has tremendous implications. It means that any government agent who says his goal was to get information, and not to cause pain, hasn't tortured no matter how bad the things he does. If the person water-boards or knee-caps a person, or buries them alive, if it's to get information - well, that's just dandy.
Once again, it's not just the substantive rules that have been assailed: It's also the mechanisms to ensure the rules are followed. Under the MCA, there is no accountability for torture. The MCA cuts off courts' power to hear claims of torture by aliens held as "unlawful enemy combatants." And it vests the President with power to interpret the relevant laws of war. So if he says that "cold cell" and sexual abuse are not "cruel and inhumane," that's the end of the matter.
There are two reasons for hope. First, any reading of the Act that reaches an untrammeled detention power may be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court in the 2004 case of Rasul v. Bush - in what one day will be called "famous footnote 15" - strongly hinted that even non-citizens captured overseas have Due Process rights. Combined with another clause of the Constitution called the Suspension Clause, this means the unchecked detention power and the jurisdiction-strip are likely unconstitutional.
Second, even if the War Crimes Act has been amended, the Due Process Clause also ought still to protect detainees held overseas: Torture is un-American. It's also unconstitutional-and that doesn't change depending on where it's done. Moreover, the law of war, embodied in the Geneva Conventions, is clear: There is no "specific intent" requirement for torture. Countries - whether it's the United States or North Korea - cannot unilaterally define down the rules against torture.
"Unchecked and unbalanced" government - I argue at length in a forthcoming book- is antithetical to American government. The MCA is also anathema to our best traditions. We must hope it is our traditions that win, and not the selfish partisan posturing that animated this week's votes.
Aziz Huq is co-writing a book on national security and the separation of powers called Unchecked and Unbalanced, to be published by the New Press.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/42345/
AlterNet:
Justice for A Genocide, in Book Form
By John Dolan, The eXile
Posted on September 30, 2006
Reviewed: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkin, (Henry Holt and Co, 2006)
One of the great mysteries of the 20th century was the way Britain got away with pillaging nearly every country on the planet without suffering any retribution. I've spent a long, bitter time brooding over this experimental proof that there's no such thing as karma. Among the reasons I've found for this failure to prosecute are the reluctance of the raped to report their sufferings, the stupidity and credulity of American scholars vis-a-vis their Oxbridge colleagues, and the charmed life that seems to reward those individuals and nations lucky enough to lack any vestige of conscience.
But there are simpler reasons, bravely revealed in Caroline Elkins's account of the slaughter of some 300,000 ethnic Kikuyu of Kenya, the torture of hundreds of thousands more, and the internment of the entire Kikuyu population, in mid-20th-century Kenya. As Elkins reveals, the Brits simply destroyed every record of the massacres they could find, and - unlike the French, Germans or other conscience-harried colonials - kept the settlers' oath of Omerta, never revealing what they did to the "Kukes" to anyone except other vets whose anecdotes were as bloody and full of blame as theirs. The difference between the British Empire and other fascist empires is not that these guys were nicer. Nobody who reads this book could continue to believe that, if they were fool enough to believe it beforehand. The difference is that the Brits were good at it, and had no conscience to trouble them. Thanks to that careful incineration of records and highly adaptive national sociopathic disorder, "...there would be no soul-searching or public accounting [in Britain] for the crimes perpetrated against the hundreds of thousands of men and women in Kenya."
The Brits had the perfect timing of the sociopath too, unlike the stubborn French who held on too long in Algeria and Indochina. The white settlers of Kenya felt that, having waded through African blood with the imperial Tories back in the U.K., they were bound by a blood-oath to the incoming Prime Minister MacMillan and his administration in 1959. The fools didn't even expect their own government would be utterly indifferent to them; as Elkins recounts, "The 'prevailing mood'...was best captured by the remarks of a young Conservative member of Parliament who proclaimed, 'What do I care about the f...cking [sic] settlers, let them bloody well look after themselves.' Rather than functioning as a referendum for empire, the general election of 1959 was its death knell." Yup, that's the great thing about sociopaths, their loyalty.
Luckily, when you torture and imprison several hundred thousand people, you can't help but leave a messy paper trail behind you. Elkins uncovers classic blurts of British Imperial discourse that happened to survive the fires, like an early administrator's grumpy concession that he can't afford to wipe out the Kikuyu at the moment: "There is only one way of improving the Waikikuyu, and that is wipe them out... but we have to depend on them for supplies."
If you come from a country invaded by the Brits - and the odds are you do, even if you're from Maryland - then this rhetoric should be familiar to you. I'm sure the same sentiment survives in the chronicles of British civilizers from Myanmar (invaded on a pretext and sacked in the 1880's) to Tibet (invaded, from sheer boredom, in the 20th century, conquered by massacre and deceit, and unacknowledged to this day by British historians).
Elkins's prose, research and conclusions are unimpeachable. Niall Ferguson himself, the most powerful contemporary apologist for Victoria's bloodsoaked, shameless meatgrinder, has admitted that. Finicky reviewers might grumble that Elkins is, if anything, too much the standard American academic historian and could have risked a livelier prose style. But that would have been foolhardy. She had to be as conventional as possible, because the Tories' favorite smearing device is to seize on anything they can call a "factual error" and use it to discredit any text that threatens to reveal their crimes.
One of the most bitterly amusing examples of this in recent history came when reviewers for empire-apologizing British magazines like the Telegraph and Spectator had to review the film Michael Collins. There's a scene in the film where, after Collins's flying squads carried out a brilliant simultaneous hit on 19 British intelligence agents in Dublin, the Black and Tans fired into a crowd of civilians at a Croke Park football match in reprisal. The Tory reviewers discovered through their tame researchers that, whereas in the film, the soldier-executioners drive an armored car onto the pitch, in reality they were on foot. They railed about that mistake for paragraphs.
Of course the incident did indeed happen. Civilians were indeed shot and killed at random by enraged squaddies at Croke Park. But those soldiers were on foot, damn it! That makes all the difference! You can't believe any of it, because the armored car never entered the field of play!
I've read so many of these insane English defenses of sheer racist slaughter that I had lost hope anyone would even try to smack the truth in their smug snouts. In fact, shock is still my strongest reaction to this book: how in God's name did Elkins get it published? How did she get a chair in History at Harvard after publishing it?
My only quibble with Elkins's account is that like most American scholars, she seems to know only her damn "field," African History. She lacks any sense of the stunning parallels between the atrocities committed by the British in suppressing the Mau Mau rebellion of the Kikuyu in Kenya and those they used in other 20th c. anti-insurgency campaigns, above all the struggle against the IRA, which taught the rest of us wogs how, by using urban guerrilla warfare, we could kill the squaddies at last.
When Elkins writes, "Mau Mau [circa 1950] became one of the first armed struggles of the twentieth century in which where superior Western firepower was no match, at least initially, for...the insurgents' use of hit-and-run tactics," I want to whisper to her, "Psst, Caroline - check out the Irish War of Independence!"
But this neglect of the wider context in no way diminishes Elkins's Homeric achievement. She seems to be one of the very, very few American academics who can play by the horrible rules of that mingy, treacherous guild and still fight the good fight. I can only think of a few others, like Miriam Hanson. They all seem to be women, for some reason. All the brave, smart people I knew at Berkeley flamed out long before they could get anything published. The publication of this book is a monument to something, or proof that there's a second, occluded god who helps us from time to time, maybe the same Promethean who gave us opiates and the printing press. Homage to him, her, it or them; and homage in full measure to this brave, straightforward professor, the noble Caroline Elkins, who somehow saw what was in front of her.
And you, the rest of you... one little question: where were you? First, you Brits. Now you know I don't credit you with much conscience, but I do find you smarter, on average, than my ex-colleagues in the USA. Those poor bumpkins don't even start their education till they're 18; what can you expect of them? But you bastards... you knew all of it, didn't you? You knew what Elkins revealed here. Which means you - you very plural - were silent, complicit, for 50 fuckin' years. You really are utterly without conscience, are you not?
And you, the rest of you, from Tibet to the Malvinas: you know your country was savaged by the Brits, but you have no way to compare notes with all the rest. That's what we need, a clearinghouse for Survivors of British Empire Rapacity. S.O.B.E.R.. From the Falls Road to Canton, we've got a true reckoning to settle.
John Dolan is an editor of the Moscow-based English-language alternative paper, The eXile. He is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/42219/
Arab News:
Bombay Cops Blame ISI in Train Blasts
Shahid Raza Burney & Azhar Masood, Arab News
Sunday, 1, October, 2006 (09, Ramadhan, 1427)
BOMBAY/ISLAMABAD, 1 October 2006 — Bombay’s chief of police Anami Narayan Roy accused Pakistan’s intelligence service yesterday of plotting and executing the July 11 suburban train blasts that killed at least 207 and injured another 700. Pakistan quickly denied the allegation.
“It’s becoming a habit of Indian policymakers to accuse Pakistan without any substantial evidence,” Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Tasnim Aslam told Arab News after Roy made his comments. “Time and again we have been asking India to come forward with evidence so that we can hunt terrorists.”
Meanwhile, agents of India’s Anti-Terrorist Squad arrested early yesterday morning Mohammed Naved on suspicion that he was the triggerman who detonated the bomb that exploded on the train near the Khar suburb.
On Friday four suspects were arrested, putting the total number that have been detained in connection with the attacks at 15. Twelve of the suspects, police say, were directly involved with planting and detonating the devices.
Speaking at a crowded press conference here, Roy charged that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) planned the attack, which was then carried out by the Islamic militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) with the help of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). He also accused ISI of providing the RDX explosives that were used in the terrorist attacks.
At the press conference, Roy provided more details of how Indian authorities think the attacks were planned. “Money for the serial blasts was received by one of the prime accused, Faisal Sheikh from the Gulf, from alleged LeT operative Rizwan Dawari,” he said. “The money was sent to Dawari by LeT from Pakistan.”
Roy said that police recovered foreign currency worth $6,933 from Faisal, who confessed to receiving about six million rupees ($130,548) from Dawari. Elaborating further, Roy said that Ethesham Siddiqui had planted the bomb on the Mira Road train; Kamaluddin Ahmed attacked the train at Matunga; Faisal Sheikh struck at Jogeshwari; and Naved struck at Khar.
The police chief said that police have completed the investigation into the attacks, but follow-up investigations would continue and more arrests were likely. Indian authorities believe that Azam Cheema, a ranking LeT militant, was running a terrorist training camp in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. To execute the train blasts, 11 Pakistani terrorists allegedly entered India through Nepal and Bangladesh. While seven of them escaped back to Pakistan. Of the remaining, two were killed, one of them, Salim of Lahore, was killed in the blasts at Mahim while another died in a shootout with police at Antop Hill. The whereabouts of the two are not known.
Roy said that the terrorists had manufactured the bombs using pressure cookers at Chembur and stored them at the Bandra residence of Faisal Sheikh. A team of two terrorists, a Pakistani and an Indian, were assigned to plant bombs on each train.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister and Home Minister R.R. Patil also said here yesterday morning that the mastermind behind the blasts is “across the border” and that the government had strong and substantial evidence to prove its stand. Patil claimed that the government had strong evidence of Pakistani organizations’ involvement in the terrorist acts. “We will prove it at the proper time”.
Of the four men arrested on Friday, suspect Mohammed Majid was allegedly an active member of a LeT sleeper cell and one of the plotters behind July’s train attacks. The Bombay police are also hunting for a SIMI activist, identified only as Junaid, believed to be another key suspect.
Tasnim Aslam, of Pakistan’s Foreign Office, said that India should work more with its neighbor in the investigation.
“Recently our president held a very useful meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Havana and the two leaders agreed to resolve many issues,” said Aslam, saying that high-ranking officials in both countries had agreed in the past to share counterterrorism intelligence.
After the blasts, India canceled peace talks with Pakistan and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accused the government of Pakistan of supporting the terrorists who perpetrated the attacks.
Indian officials have promised to resolve this case in a more timely fashion than the ongoing 1993 blasts trials, where only in the past week some of the suspects have been found guilty and sentenced.
Copyright: Arab News © 2003 All rights reserved.
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=87452&d=1&m=10&y=2006
Asia Times:
Afghanistan: Why NATO cannot win
By M K Bhadrakumar
Sep 30, 2006
The four-month-old Republic of Montenegro on the Adriatic Sea received its first foreign dignitary on Monday when US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrived at its capital, Podgorica. Unknowingly, the tiny country of rugged mountains and great beauty in the Balkans with a population of 630,000 was being catapulted into the cockpit of 21st-century geopolitics.
Rumsfeld's mission was to request the inexperienced leadership in Podgorica to dispatch a military contingent to form part of the coalition of the willing in the "war on terror". Rumsfeld promised that in return, the US would help train Montenegro's fledgling army to standards of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
However, Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic could not make any commitments. Rumsfeld's proposal came at an awkward moment for the leadership in Podgorica, which had just scrapped the draft and was scaling down its 4,000-strong army to about 2,500.
This bizarre diplomatic exchange between the most awesome military power on Earth and the newest member of the "international community" brings home the paradoxes of the "war on terror" on the eve of its fifth anniversary. Three ministerial-level meetings of NATO have taken place within the space of the past month alone, specifically with the intent of ascertaining how troop strength in Afghanistan can be augmented.
US Marine Corps General James Jones, NATO's supreme commander of operations, has admitted that the fierce resistance put up by the Taliban and the burgeoning insurgency has taken the alliance by surprise. NATO forces have realized that an all-out war is at hand, rather than the peacekeeping mission that was imagined earlier. New rules of engagement have been accordingly drawn up for NATO contingents deployed in the southern provinces of Afghanistan - and soon to be extended to the whole country, where US soldiers are reportedly to be put under NATO control.
British commanders in southern Afghanistan have been given clearance to use the army's controversial Hydra rockets, which can target large concentrations of people with tungsten darts. The commanders are also permitted to resort to air strikes on suspected Taliban formations, conduct preemptive strikes and set up ambushes. Yet a British commander has been reported as telling the media, "The intensity and ferocity of the fighting is far greater than in Iraq on a daily basis."
The fatality rate of the 18,500-strong NATO force averages about five per week, which is roughly equal to the losses suffered by the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Indeed, in withering comments to The Sunday Telegraph newspaper last weekend, Soviet commanders who oversaw Moscow's disastrous campaign have predicted that the NATO forces will ultimately be forced to flee from Afghanistan.
General Boris Gromov, the charismatic Soviet commander who supervised the withdrawal in 1989, warned, "The Afghan resistance is, in my opinion, growing. Such behavior on the part of the intractable Afghans is to my mind understandable. It is conditioned by centuries of tradition, geography, climate and religion.
"We saw over a period of many years how the country was torn apart by civil war ... But in the face of outside aggressions, Afghans have always put aside their differences and united. Evidently, the [US-led] coalition forces are also being seen as a threat to the nation."
A comparison with the 1980s is in order. The 100,000-strong Soviet army operated alongside a full-fledged Afghan army of equal strength with an officer corps trained in the elite Soviet military academies, and backed by aviation, armored vehicles and artillery, with all the advantages of a functioning, politically motivated government in Kabul. And yet it proved no match for the Afghan resistance.
In comparison, there are about 20,000 US troops in Afghanistan, plus roughly the same number of troops belonging to NATO contingents, which includes 5,400 troops from Britain, 2,500 from Canada and 2,300 from the Netherlands. Nominally, there is a 42,000-strong Afghan National Army, but it suffers from a high rate of defection.
General Jones has asked for 2,500 additional NATO troops. But the major NATO countries - Turkey, France, Germany, Spain and Italy - have declined to send more. In actuality, it is questionable whether 2,500 more troops would make any significant difference in a country of the size of Afghanistan and with such a difficult terrain.
Distinguished British soldier-politician Sir Cyril Townsend wrote in Al-Hayat newspaper this week, "A realistic military appreciation of the situation would be that to gain the upper hand against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and to start winning over the southeast of the country, will require deployment of at least 10,000 extra, highly trained professional and well-equipped troops with matching air support."
Clearly, a huge crisis is shaping up for NATO. Its credibility is at stake. Sir Cyril does not foresee that the alliance will come up with the required military resources "to beat the Taliban on its own ground". No wonder Lieutenant-General David Richards, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan and former assistant chief of the general staff of the British army, ominously warned in a recent television interview, "We need to realize we could actually fail here."
Most observers have pointed a finger at the developing crisis in Afghanistan almost exclusively in terms of the shortfalls in achieving a rapid, high-tech military victory over the Taliban. In the ensuing blame game, there is the recurrent criticism that Washington did not commit enough forces.
Some say that the Iraq war turned out to be an unfortunate distraction for the US administration from wrapping up and following up on the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001. Others put the blame on the European member countries of NATO - that the Europeans are far too timid and self-centered to fight wars in faraway lands, even if it is for their ultimate good.
Widening somewhat the gyre of the blame game, almost everyone acknowledges that opium is eating away the vitals of the Afghan state as counter-drug operations have been a dismal failure.
And, of course, there is the perennial accusation that US regional policy during the administration of George W Bush has been on the whole negligent about "nation-building" and that Washington has been tardy in earmarking enough material and financial resources for Afghanistan's reconstruction (in comparison with East Timor or Bosnia-Herzegovina).
All such criticism may contain elements of truth. But germane to the crisis in a fundamental sense is the hard reality that no matter the oft-repeated factor of a reasonably secure cross-border sanctuary in Pakistan, the Taliban have indeed staged a comeback in essence as an indigenous guerilla force capable of waging a long-term struggle. That is to say, the central issue is that the US has simply failed to come up with a winning political and military strategy in Afghanistan.
Comparison has been drawn with the successful peacekeeping operations in the Balkans. General Wesley Clark, former supreme commander of NATO, wrote in Newsweek magazine recently, "In order to succeed, we must adopt some of the lessons and practices we put in place so painfully in the Balkans. We must acknowledge the magnitude of the task and pull in the full authority of the international community. NATO can do much more than just supply troops. We need to acknowledge that, yes, we do nation-building."
But again, the Afghan problem is vastly dissimilar from the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. First and foremost, there is the highly contrived nature of the US intervention in Afghanistan. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, in an international environment where "we are all Americans", as Le Monde famously wrote, no one asked any hard questions as to whether Washington's decision to attack Afghanistan was justified or not. The international community simply acquiesced.
But the fact remains that Washington, indeed, had the option to forgo direct intervention and instead to extend its decisive political, diplomatic and military support to the anti-Taliban Afghan groups that, under the compulsions arising out of the assassination of the Northern Alliance's Ahmad Shah Masoud, were finally rallying under the leadership of former king Zahir Shah and were just about ready by late September 2001 to announce the establishment of an Afghan government-in-exile.
The Afghan king himself was persuaded at long last to give up his reticence about returning to active politics after three decades of exile in Rome. That option, had it been pursued, would have opened the way for a quintessentially "Afghan solution" to the challenge posed by the Taliban regime - a solution that would have enjoyed the full sanctity of Afghan traditions and culture.
But the Bush administration deliberately chose not to take that option. Conceivably, Washington decided that only a spectacular military operation would assuage the US public, which was traumatized by the September 11 attacks, and highlight the decisive leadership in the White House in safeguarding national security.
Arguably, Afghanistan would also have been viewed by the Bush administration as a laboratory where Washington could test its doctrines of preemptive military strike, the "coalition of the willing", unilateralism, etc - doctrines that provided the political underpinning for the subsequent invasion of Iraq. Or, in the medium and long term, Washington estimated that short of a military presence inside Afghanistan and without a client regime installed in Kabul, the US would be unable to ease other regional powers from the Afghan chessboard and reorder the geopolitics of the region as part of its global strategy.
At any rate, the stratagem aimed at exploiting the Afghan problem to seize geopolitical advantages was not so apparent at the beginning. But it didn't take long before it became clear that the US agenda was to exploit the "war on terror" for establishing a client state in Afghanistan, and for gaining a sought-after military presence in Central Asia. And in the event, the US military presence incrementally paved the way for creating a base for NATO in the region.
There was a high degree of sophistry in the US military operations in October 2001 as well. In the initial stages, an impression was created deliberately that the US intervention would be confined to air operations and the induction of a limited number of special forces specifically for the purpose of advising and guiding the Northern Alliance militia.
Thus the Northern Alliance furiously protested when it first came to be know of the sudden arrival of US ground troops at Bagram airport in early November 2001, in the wake of the overthrow of the Taliban government.
Washington also gave different impressions to different interlocutors in the region regarding the nature of the post-Taliban regime it had in mind. Certainly, the mostly non-Pashtun Northern Alliance leadership was led to believe that the overthrow of the Taliban would automatically result in its return to the seat of power in Kabul from where it was evicted by the Taliban in 1996.
Conceivably, regional powers such as Russia, Iran and India, too, were persuaded to fancy that such an outcome was in the cards and that the transfer of power in Kabul to the Northern Alliance leadership would ultimately work to their advantage, given their past material, financial, political and diplomatic backing of the alliance as the spearhead of the anti-Taliban resistance during the period 1996-2001.
On the other hand, Islamabad was given assurances by Washington that a Pashtun-majority government in Kabul was in the making and that incrementally there would be a political accommodation of erstwhile Taliban elements in the emergent power structure. Islamabad no doubt sought and gained an assurance from Washington that under no circumstances would the Northern Alliance be allowed to grab power in Kabul in the post-Taliban phase.
All this while, Washington seemed to have had Abdul Haq, the famous mujahideen leader with long-standing links with US intelligence, as its first choice to assume the leadership in Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban.
But in the event, Haq was assassinated by the Taliban, most likely with the connivance of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which got wind of Washington's hidden agenda and feared that Haq wouldn't be amenable to Islamabad's persuasions once he was ensconced in power in Kabul.
Meanwhile, the Northern Alliance outwitted its US mentors. Contrary to the tacit understanding between alliance commanders and their American mentors to the effect that after the Taliban's ouster Kabul would initially remain a neutral city under United Nations control, the alliance militia occupied the capital and its leadership unilaterally installed itself in power. These leaders hoped (optimistically, as it turned out) that the US would have little choice but to accept the fait accompli.
Thus when the Bonn conference got under way in December 2001, Washington had a two-point agenda, namely to project a credible substitute for the late Haq as the leader of the new setup and, second, to do some arm-twisting to cajole the Northern Alliance to give up its leadership role in Kabul.
Nonetheless, when the US brought up Hamid Karzai's name in Bonn, there was widespread opposition by Afghan groups. In the perceptions of the Afghan participants at the Bonn conference, Karzai simply didn't have enough standing as a political leader in the Afghan scene, having sat in exile in the US for the past several years, and being at a serious disadvantage insofar as he did not belong to a major Pashtun tribe.
But the United States pressed ahead regardless with Karzai's name, given his closeness to the US establishment and his total dependence on US support. The US brought immense pressure to bear on Afghan groups present at Bonn to accept Karzai's leadership. It was with extreme reluctance that the Northern Alliance leader, president Burhanuddin Rabbani, finally handed over the levers of power to Karzai.
While abdicating from power in Kabul in early 2002, Rabbani said he hoped that it was the last time the proud Afghan people would be bullied by foreigners. Anyone familiar with Afghan ethos and character could foresee at that juncture that Karzai would find it next to impossible to consolidate his grip on power, let alone establish his authority over the entire country. Indeed, that is exactly what has happened over the past five years.
The repeated and brazen manipulations by the US during the past five years, especially during the parliamentary and presidential elections in Afghanistan held under election rules that were tailor-made for predictable results, failed to ensure that Karzai commanded respect in the Afghan bazaar.
US attempts to consolidate a Pashtun power base for Karzai have virtually failed. Equally, the episodic attempts to create dissension within the Taliban have also not worked. In turn, these failures led to large-scale Pashtun alienation. US efforts to marginalize the Northern Alliance and to enlarge the ethnic-Pashtun representation in Karzai's cabinet have not had the desired effect of meaningfully tackling Pashtun alienation, either. Arguably, they may have created latent resentment among Northern Alliance leaders, which lies below the surface for the time being.
In other words, there is a fundamental issue of the legitimacy of state power that remains unresolved in Afghanistan. At a minimum, in these past five years there should have been an intra-Afghan dialogue that included the Taliban. This initiative could have been under UN auspices on a parallel track.
The inability to earn respect and command authority plus the heavy visible dependence on day-to-day US support have rendered the Kabul setup ineffective. Alongside this, the Afghan malaise of nepotism, tribal affiliations and corruption has also led to bad governance. It is in this combination of circumstances that the Taliban have succeeded in staging a comeback.
What lies ahead is, therefore, becoming extremely difficult to predict. Even with 2,500 additional troops it is highly doubtful whether NATO can succeed in defeating the Taliban. For one thing, the Taliban enjoy grassroots support within Afghanistan. There is no denying this ground reality.
Second, the Taliban are becoming synonymous with Afghan resistance. The mindless violations of the Afghan code of honor by the coalition forces during their search-and-destroy missions and the excessive use of force during military operations leading to loss of innocent lives have provoked widespread revulsion among Afghan people.
Karzai's inability to do anything about the coalition forces' arbitrary behavior is only adding to his image of a weak leader and is deepening his overall loss of authority in the perceptions of the Afghan people, apart from strengthening the raison d'etre of the Afghan resistance.
Third, it is a matter of time, if the threshold of the Taliban resurgence goes unchecked, before the non-Pashtun groups in the eastern, northern and western regions also begin to organize themselves. There are disturbing signs pointing in this direction already. If that were to happen, NATO forces might well find themselves in the unenviable situation of getting caught in the crossfire between various warring ethnic groups.
Fourth, at a certain point it becomes unavoidable that regional powers will get drawn into the strife. The fact remains that all Afghan ethnic groups enjoy a contiguous presence across the borders in neighboring countries. There is considerable misgiving among regional powers already over Washington's hidden long-term agenda to bring Afghanistan, which has been historically a neutral country, under the NATO flag.
No amount of pious homilies about NATO's role and objectives can obfuscate the geopolitical implications of the Western alliance's occupation of a strategically important country far away from the European continent, which lies at the crossroads of vast regions that are becoming the battleground for global influence.
Without doubt, in the perceptions of regional powers, NATO's defeat in Afghanistan can only mean the scattering of the US blueprint of domination of Central Asia, South Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, stated in testimony at the House International Relations Committee of the US Congress in Washington last week: "Foreign pressures are making Afghanistan the turf for proxy wars. The country is being destabilized by an inflow of insurgents and weapons and money and intelligence. There is collusion from neighboring countries, and this is a problem in itself."
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001).
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HI30Df01.html
Asia Times:
Military policy in Afghanistan 'barking mad'
By Sanjay Suri
LONDON - There have been critics enough of the US-led military actions under way in Afghanistan, but now military commanders, too, have begun to question just what they are doing in Afghanistan.
Most prominently, an officer who was an aide to the British forces in Helmand, the southern district of Afghanistan that has witnessed the strongest fighting between the Taliban and international forces, has come out with strong criticism of the British army in Afghanistan - and quit the army.
Captain Leo Docherty said the British campaign in Helmand province was "a textbook case of how to screw up a counterinsurgency". His statements came in an open letter that was reported in the British media - but not followed up in much public debate.
The officer raised the fundamental question of the development of Afghanistan arising from the campaign to capture Sangin town in Helmand, a military campaign in which he participated. Docherty says British troops managed to capture the Taliban stronghold, but then had nothing to offer by way of development.
"The military is just one side of the triangle," he said. "Where were the Department for International Development and the Foreign Office?" As forces sat back with little to offer, the Taliban hit back and British troops there were bunkered up and under daily attack, he wrote. "Now the ground has been lost and all we're doing in places like Sangin is surviving," said Docherty. "It's completely barking mad."
And such action is only provoking greater support for the Taliban, he warned. "All those people whose homes have been destroyed and sons killed are going to turn against the British. It's a pretty clear equation - if people are losing homes and poppy fields, they will go and fight. I certainly would." He added that British troops had been "grotesquely clumsy" in their operations, and that the military policy was "pretty shocking and not something I want to be part of".
Development and rights groups have for long been critical of an exclusively military intervention. They have warned also that military action of this kind appears to local Afghans as part of a larger Western assault on the Muslim world.
"There were windows of opportunity for collaboration five years ago between the West and Muslim countries, but the window of opportunity is closed now, that is for sure," said Emmanuel Reinert, head of the Senlis Council, an independent group studying the effects of drug policies in Afghanistan.
"We can still reopen it, but we need to show that we are going to change our ways," he said. "There has to be a clear change in our approach, a change of management."
There is little promise that will happen. The United States has been struggling to get more soldiers into Afghanistan to bolster the international force. The emphasis on strengthening the military rather than raising resources for development is only getting enhanced.
Human development by way of improved rights for women is in fact becoming a casualty of the military operations - after declarations that human development was one of the goals of the Afghanistan intervention, besides countering terrorism.
The Senlis Council has reported starvation conditions in several parts of southern Afghanistan. And this is only increasing support for the Taliban, and potentially for terrorism, too.
The increased military presence is not always helping the military, either. Another British army officer said in a leaked e-mail that the air force was "utterly, utterly useless" in protecting troops on the ground in Afghanistan. The air force has been called in as ground troops face increased attacks from the Taliban.
Such military voices from the front in Afghanistan are in alarming tune with warnings from groups such as the Senlis Council. Some soldiers are talking the language of development now more than governments are.
The new voices from Washington suggest increased pressure on Pakistan to cease military support for the Taliban, under pressure from visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Much of the future of Afghanistan could depend on decisions - or the lack of them - on increasing development support for the country.
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HI30Df02.html
Asia Times:
Iraq: Republic of fear
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - This author attended a conference this year on Iraq with leading administrators, analysts and politicians from Iraq and the Middle East. One question was put forward on how the new Iraqi leaders could bring security to Iraq when nearly 1,500 people were dying per month from sectarian violence and terrorist attacks.
The Iraqi participants, all members of the post-Saddam Hussein regime, started an intellectual debate on which security and anti-terrorism campaigns would best fit war-torn Iraq. They were fine men indeed, all groomed in the finest schools of Europe and the United States, with honorable careers in opposing Saddam from the diaspora. Their ideas were good for a television debate or an op-ed in a US newspaper, but very difficult to implement when it came to Iraqi domestics.
Although it is difficult for Iraqis and Americans to admit, Iraq needs a strongman to bring order and stability. In 1990, Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi went to Iran to discuss problems in the Middle East with Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Gandhi asked the president who would, should or could replace Saddam as president of Iraq.
After pondering for a minute, Rafsanjani replied, "Saddam Hussein." Only Saddam, he said, could rule a country so divided and sectarian as Iraq. That statement is not entirely correct, but it carries a lot of truth in it. Iraq today does not need a Saddam Hussein, but it does need a very strong and able leader with talent, character and power, backed by a united and focused central government.
Only this kind of leader would be able to disarm the militias forcefully, something that current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has failed to do because of his alliance to the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. Further, the leader has to be strong enough to distribute government posts based on merit rather than confessional lines or the patron system that is popular in the Arab world.
When this was suggested at the conference, one participant furiously snapped back, "If our Arab brothers like to be ruled by dictatorships, then this is their business. We want to be free. We want to live in democracy!" So much for democracy, I said to myself, where thousands are being condemned to death by squads at night in the streets of Baghdad.
In July and August, a total of 6,599 Iraqis were killed. It is now clear, more than ever, that what is happening in Iraq is not a democracy. It is pure sectarian madness.
In 1998, Kanan Makiya wrote his groundbreaking book Republic of Fear about the horror of the Saddam Hussein era. In every sense of the word, Iraq today - very unfortunately - is once again "a republic of fear". Arab journalists and analysts have said it. So have kings and presidents. Some Western journalists and politicians have said it. I personally have heard it from many Iraqis.
And now a senior United Nations official and torture expert, Manfred Mowak, has also said it, pointing out, "The situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand. The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it had been in the times of Saddam Hussein." A blow indeed to the promises of US President George W Bush, who said this month that Iraq is now safer than what it was under Saddam.
The National Intelligence Estimate
If Iraq is no better off than it was under Saddam, neither is the US with its "war on terror".
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), drawn from 16 US spy agencies, bluntly says that the Iraq war has enflamed emotions in the Muslim world, created a new generation of fanatics and, because of US atrocities and torture of prisoners, led to more radicalization in Islamic terrorism against the United States. Among other things, the NIE shows that because of the Iraqi war, the Madrid bombings of March 2004 took place, as did the London Underground bombings of July 2005.
It does not, however, call for a US withdrawal from Iraq. The report says that defeating terrorists in Iraq (in other words, staying longer in Iraqi territory) would help defeat the international Islamification threat. Senator Edward Kennedy was quoted saying that the report "should put the final nail in the coffin for President Bush's phony argument about the Iraq war".
On the day that the NIE was leaked, at least 20 people were killed and 41 were injured in violence across Iraq. The following day, retired US Army Major-General John Batiste, who had commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq in 2004-05, said the war had made the US "arguably less safe now than it was on September 11, 2001".
A few days later, a United Nations report on Iraq was released, saying that the Iraq war had provided al-Qaeda with a fresh generation of jihadis and a training center for terrorism. Al-Qaeda was leading the insurgency in Iraq, the report added, and supporting the Taliban resistance in Afghanistan.
Adding to the Bush administration's worries was yet another report presented by a think-tank affiliated with the British Ministry of Defense, which said Iraq had become "a recruiting sergeant" for Islamic fanatics and terrorism. It said Iraq "has served to radicalize already disillusioned youth and al-Qaeda has given them the will, intent, purpose and ideology to act".
The University of Maryland conducted a poll suggesting that 71% of Iraqis wanted their government to ask US troops to leave within a year. Seventy-seven percent of those polled thought that this would not happen and that the US intended to keep permanent bases in Iraq. The Iraqis used for the study were 1,000 random citizens from the 18 provinces of Iraq.
Another poll, conducted by the US State Department, found that nearly three-quarters of respondents said they would feel safe if US troops left Iraq, and 65% said they wanted an immediate pullout. This applied to all regions except the pro-US Kurdish districts, said the 20-page State Department report.
A recent poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg showed that 55% of Americans thought the situation in Iraq under Saddam was not worth going to war over. Eleven percent said the insurgents were winning the war, rather than the Americans, while 63% - very correctly - said neither side was winning.
If the US is determined to "stay the course", these are some of the issues it will have to address in saving Iraq from this "republic of fear".
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI30Ak02.html
Clarín: Tailandia: el gobierno golpista
designó como primer ministro a un militar retirado
La junta que encabezó el golpe de Estado hace dos semanas eligió al general Surayud Chulanont como jefe de gobierno interino hasta las elecciones previstas para el año próximo. Hasta ahora, Chulanont era un estrecho asesor del rey Bhumibol Adulyadej.
Clarín.com, 01.10.2006
Dos semanas después del golpe de Estado, los militares que derrocaron al primer ministro Thaksin Shinawatra designaron hoy al general retirado Surayud Chulanont como jefe de gobierno interino hasta las próximas elecciones. Chulanont es un estrecho asesor del rey Bhumibol Adulyadej, quien previamente aprobó la Constitución provisional que le presentaron los militares golpistas.
Horas después del anuncio, el general Surayud Chulanont rindió juramento como primer ministro interino, tras el anuncio de una constitución provisional que reservó poderes considerables para los autores el golpe militar.
Antes de las elecciones, que se anunciaron para el año 2007, los militares tailandeses también designarán un Parlamento provisional. El denominado Consejo para la Reforma Democrática también se reservó el derecho de reemplazar nuevamente al gobierno si la situación en el país se desestabiliza.
El general Surayud, que nació el 28 de agosto de 1943, dirigió al ejército tailandés de 1998 a 2002. A fines de 2003 fue nombrado consejero del rey.
Copyright 1996-2006 Clarín.com - All rights reserved
http://www.clarin.com/diario/2006/10/01/um/m-01282081.htm
Harper's Magazine:
A Cartoon
Posted on Friday, September 29, 2006. By Mr. Fish
This is A Cartoon, a cartoon by Mr. Fish, published Friday, September 29, 2006. It is part of The Cartoons of Mr. Fish: a Selection, which is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
Written By
Fish, Mr.
Permanent URL
http://harpers.org/Clinton-20060929.html
New Statesman:
Rory's Week
Rory Bremner
Monday 2nd October 2006
How can Mandelson talk such nonsense without his tongue catching fire?
It's never a good sign if you’re stressed out, pissed off and in a muck sweat before 7.30 on a Monday morning. The minicab I’d ordered for 7.15 arrived at 6.45, waking the dogs, which started to bark the house down. Half-dressed and with a toothbrush in my mouth, I had to make what Tony Blair would call a tough decision: whether to rush downstairs and quieten the dogs (which risked waking the children) or leave them barking (which risked the dogs waking the children).
I hurried down to deal with the dogs, only to run into my three-year-old ("Can I get up now?") and discover in any case that the puppy had decided to crap. It was now 6.50. "I did say 7.15, didn't I?" I asked the taxi driver. "Yes," he replied cheerily. "Better early than late, though!" Not today, matey.
On the way back to the bathroom I run into my other daughter ("Can I get up now?"). After 15 minutes trying to persuade the children back to bed and removing crap from sheepskin rug, I slump into the car. I am beginning to console myself that things can't get any worse when the unmistakable voice of Peter Mandelson crackles over the airwaves, warning the Labour Party in general (and Gordon Brown in particular) against "old-style operators in the party who thrive in smoke-filled rooms and are best left there, frankly". I'm constantly surprised that he is able to come out with such hypocritical nonsense without his tongue catching fire and his lips blistering.
"The new policy agendas won't come out of one person's head," he says. Where does he imagine the old policy agenda came from, if not out of the head of his sainted hero, Tony Blair? Blair once said he'd have succeeded when the party had learned to love Peter. It looks like Peter is returning the compliment, trying to persuade the party to love Tony again.
Monday morning is crunch time at Bremner, Bird and Fortune: that’s when, having negotiated the various crises at home and on the public transport system, I finally make it to the office to confront Geoff, my producer, and together we decide what to do in this week’s programme. We then have a day and a half to write the scripts before we head off to film on Wednesday and Thursday, adding the monologues on Friday. Our agenda is always a combination of covering stories that are happening in the week (Labour conference, Clinton in town, Romania and Bulgaria allowed to join the EU), trying to anticipate next week (Tories gearing up for conference), and inventing some inspired silliness. In a world increasingly dominated by uninspiring characters like George Osborne, John Hutton and Alan "Interesting" Johnson, it’s not easy. And so it is that I find myself agreeing to stand in a field full of shit, dressed as Hazel Blears (me, that is, not the shit) and holding a shovel. My week is going to be dominated by shit.
I interrupt some background reading about immigration (did you know there are now more doctors from Malawi in Manchester than there are in the whole of Malawi?) to watch the second half of Gordon Brown’s speech. Like Blair, he’s good at this stuff, and it is every bit as much an audition speech for the leadership as the five we were treated to last year from the Tory candidates.
Brown has to offer a new vision without entirely trashing the old one. Blair uses his speech, as ever, to try to justify and renew Blairism, though I'm still not sure what Philip Gould, David Hill and others mean by that. Maybe, like the Dome, it's an idea coined before they decided what the point of it was. But then the Dome was something inherited from the Tories; new Labour then tried to make it work in a slightly different way without altering the basic concept. Or was that Blairism?
"Bremner, Bird and Fortune" is on Channel 4 this Saturday at 8pm
This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200610020058
The Independent: Marwahin, 15 July 2006:
The anatomy of a massacre
A special report by Robert Fisk
Published: 30 September 2006
In antiquity, Pliny wrote of the cliffs of Bayada. The chalk runs down to the Mediterranean in an almost Dover-like cascade of white rock, and the view from the top - just below the little Lebanese village of Chama'a - is breathtaking. To the south lies the United Nations headquarters and the Israeli frontier, to the north the city of Tyre, its long promentary, built by Alexander the Great, lunging out into the green-blue sea. A winding, poorly-made road runs down to the shore below Chama'a and for some reason - perhaps because he had caught sight of the Israeli warship off the coast - 58-year-old Ali Kemal Abdullah took a right turn above the Mediterranean on the morning of 15 July. In the open-topped pick-up behind him, Ali had packed 27 Lebanese refugees, most of them children. Twenty-three of them were to die within the next 15 minutes.
The tragedy of these poor young people and of their desperate attempts to survive their repeated machine-gunning from the air is as well-known in Lebanon as it is already forgotten abroad. War crimes are easy to talk about when they have been committed in Rwanda or Bosnia; less so in Lebanon, especially when the Israelis are involved. But all the evidence suggests that what happened on this blissfully lovely coastline two and a half months ago was a crime against humanity, one that is impossible to justify on any military grounds since the dead and wounded were fleeing their homes on the express orders of the Israelis themselves.
Mohamed Abdullah understands the reality of that terrible morning because his 52-year-old wife Zahra, his sons Hadi, aged six, and 15-year-old Wissam, and his daughters, Marwa, aged 10, and 13-year old Myrna, were in the pick-up. Zahra was to die. So was Hadi and the beautiful little girl Myrna whose photograph - with immensely intelligent, appealing eyes - now haunts the streets of Marwahin. Wissam, a vein in his leg cut open by an Israeli missile as he vainly tried to save Myrna's life, sits next to his father as he talks to me outside their Beirut house, its walls drenched in black cloth.
"From the day of the attack until now, lots of delegations have come to see us," Mohamed says. "They all talk and it is all for nothing. My problem is with a huge nation. Can the international community get me my rights? I am a weak person, unprotected. I am a 53-year-old man and I've been working as a soldier for 29 years, day and night, to be productive and to support a family that can serve society and that can be a force for good in this country. I was able to build a home in my village for my wife and children - with no help from anyone - and I did this in 2000, 23 years after I was driven out of Marwahin and I finished our new home this year." And here Mohamed Abdullah stops speaking and cries.
Marwahin is one of a string of villages opposite the Israeli border and, unlike many others further north, is inhabited by Sunni Muslim Lebanese, followers of the assassinated former prime minister Rafiq Hariri rather than the Shiite-dominated Hizbollah militia, which is supported and supplied by Syria and Iran. Most Sunnis blame Syria for Hariri's murder on 14 February last year.
While no friends of Israel, the Sunni community in Lebanon - especially the few thousand Sunnis of Marwahin who are so close to the frontier that they can see the red roofs of the nearest Jewish settlement - are no threat to Israel. For generations, they have intermarried - which is why most of the people in this tragedy hold the family name of al-Abdullah or Ghanem - and, had their parents been born a few hundred metres further south, they would - like the Sunni Muslim Palestinians who lived there until 1948 - have fled to the refugee camps of Lebanon when Israel was created.
Mohamed recalls with immense tiredness how his wife took his children south from Beirut to their family home in Marwahin on 9 July this year. The date is important because just three days later, Hizbollah members would cross the Israeli border, capture two Israeli soldiers and kill three others - five more were to die in a minefield later the same day - and Israel would respond with 34 days of air-strikes and bombardments that killed more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians. Hizbollah missiles would kill fewer than 200 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Just down the hill from Marwahin, on Israeli territory, stands a tall radio transmission tower and on the morning of 15 July, the Israelis used loudspeakers on the tower to order the villagers to flee their homes. Survivors describe how they visited two nearby UN posts to appeal for protection, one manned by four members of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organisation - set up after the 1948 war with Israel - and the other by Ghanaian soldiers of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, the same army which, much expanded with French, Italian, Turkish and Chinese troops, is now supposed to police the latest ceasefire in southern Lebanon. Both the UNTSO men and the Ghanaians read the rule-book at the villagers of Marwahin. Ever since the Israelis attacked the UNIFIL barracks at Qana in 1996, slaughtering 106 Lebanese refugees - again, most of them children - the UN has been under orders not to allow civilians into their bases. The UN, it seems, can talk mightily of the need to protect the innocent, f but will do precious little to shield them in southern Lebanon.
Mohamed's four children had travelled south with their mother to buy furniture for their newly-built home; their father and his six other children in Beirut were to join them the following week.
"When the Israeli soldiers were taken, the airport closed down and all the roads became dangerous," Mohamed says. "But the mobile phones still worked and I had constant conversations with my wife. I asked her what was happening in the village. She said the Israelis were bombing in the fields around the village but not in the village itself. She had no car and anyway it was too dangerous to travel on the roads. On 13 and 14 July, we spoke six or seven times. She was asking about those of our children who were with me. You see, she had heard that Beirut had been bombed so we were worried about each other."
Mohamed's calvary began when he turned to the Arabia television station on the morning of the 15th. "I heard that the people of Marwahin had been ordered by the Israelis to leave their homes within two hours. I tried to call my wife and children but I couldn't get through. Then after half an hour, Zahra called me to say she was in the neighbouring village of Um Mtut and that people had gone to the UN to seek help and been turned away."
Mohamed insists - though other villagers do not agree with this - that while the UN were turning the civilians away, a van drove into Marwahin containing missiles. The driver was a member of Hizbollah, he says, and its registration number was 171364 (Lebanese registrations have no letters). If this is true, it clearly created a "crisis" - to use Mohamed al-Abdullah's word - in the village. Certainly, once the ceasefire came into place 32 days later, there was a damaged van beside the equally damaged village mosque with a missile standing next to it. Human rights investigators are unclear of the date of the van's arrival but seem certain that it was attacked by the Israelis - probably by an air-fired rocket - after Marwahin was evacuated.
In her last conversation with her husband, Zahra told Mohamed that the four children were having breakfast in a neighbour's house in Um Mtut. "I told her to stay with these people," Mohamed recalls. "I said that if all the civilians were together, they would be protected. My brother-in-law, Ali Kemal al-Abdullah, had a small pick-up and they could travel in this." First to leave Marwahin was a car driven by Ahmed Kassem who took his children with him and promised to telephone from Tyre if he reached the city safely. He called a couple of hours later to say the road was OK and that he had reached Tyre. "That's when Ali put his children and my children and his own grandchildren in the pick-up. There were 27 people, almost 20 of them children."
Ali Kemal drove north from Marwahin, away from the Israeli border, then west towards the sea. He must have seen the Israeli warship and the Israeli naval crew certainly saw Ali's pick-up. The Israelis had been firing at all vehicles on the roads of southern Lebanon for three days - they hit dozens of civilian cars as well as ambulances and never once explained their actions except to claim that they were shooting at "terrorists". At a corner of the road, where it descends to the sea, Ali Kemal suddenly realised his vehicle was overheating and he pulled to a halt. This was a dangerous place to break down. For seven minutes, he tried to restart the pick-up.
According to Mohamed's son Wissam, Ali - whose elderly mother Sabaha was sitting beside him in the front - turned to the children with the words: "Get out, all you children get out and the Israelis will realise we are civilians." The first two or three children had managed to climb out the back when the Israeli warship fired a shell that exploded in the cab of the pick-up, killing Ali and Sabaha instantly. "I had almost been able to jump from the vehicle - my mother had told me to jump before the ship hit us," Wissam says. "But the pressure of the explosion blew me out when I had only one leg over the railing and I was wounded. There was blood everywhere."
Within a few seconds, Wissam says, an Israeli Apache helicopter arrived over the f vehicle, very low and hovering just above the children. "I saw Myrna still in the pick-up and she was crying and pleading for help. I went to get her and that's when the helicopter hit us. Its missile hit the back of the vehicle where all the children were and I couldn't hear anything because the blast had damaged my ears. Then the helicopter fired a rocket into the car behind the pick-up. But the pilot must have seen what he was doing. He could see we were mostly children. The pick-up didn't have a roof. All the children were crammed in the back and clearly visible."
Wissam talks slowly but without tears as he describes what happened next. "I lost sight of Myrna. I just couldn't see her any more for the dust flying around. Then the helicopter came back and started firing its guns at the children, at any of them who moved. I ran away behind a tel [a small hill] and lay there and pretended to be dead because I knew the pilot would kill me if I moved. Some of the children were in bits."
Wissam is correct about the mutilations. Hadi was burned to death in Zahra's arms. She died clutching his body to her. Two small girls - Fatmi and Zainab Ghanem - were blasted into such small body parts that they were buried together in the same grave after the war was over. Other children lay wounded by the initial shell burst and rocket explosions as the helicopter attacked them again. Only four survived, Wissam and his sister Marwa among them, hearing the sound of bullets as they "played dead" amid the corpses.
His father Mohamed heard on the radio that a pick-up had been attacked by the Israelis at Bayada, perhaps 10km from Marwahin. "When I heard that the driver was Ali Kemal al-Abdullah, I knew - I knew - that my children were on that truck," he says, "because my brother-in-law would not have left them behind. He would have taken them with him. I had another brother in Tyre and I called him. He had heard the same news and was waiting at the hospital. He said it was too dangerous to travel from Beirut to Tyre. He said that my family were only wounded. I said that if they were only wounded, I wanted to speak to them. I spoke to Marwa. She said Wissam was in the operating theatre. I asked to speak to the others. My brother just said: 'Later.'"
No one who has travelled the roads of southern Lebanon under Israeli air attack can underestimate the dangers. But Mohamed and his nephew Khalil decided to make the run to Tyre in the afternoon. "We just drove fast, all the way," Mohamed remembers. "I got to the Hiram hospital and I found Ali, my brother, waiting for me. I saw Marwa and I asked about her mother and Hadi and Myrna and she said: 'I saw them in the pick-up, sleeping. When the ship hit us, I was blown out of the vehicle. Afterwards, I saw Mummy and my brother sleeping.'" Marwa told Mohamed that she had run from the pick-up with her 19-year-old cousin Zeinab.
When Mohamed drove to the city hospital in Tyre in search of Zahra, Hadi and Myrna, his brother refused to travel with him. "At this point, I knew there was something wrong. So I went to the hospital on my own and I found my wife and children in the fridge. It was a horrible shock. To this day, I feel like I am dreaming. And I cannot believe what happened. No one came to ask me about Marwa or Wissam who lost a vein in his leg. It seems no one knows that this house has martyrs."
Before the ceasefire in southern Lebanon, Mohamed was called to say that the medical authorities in Tyre wished to bury the dead of Marwahin temporarily in a mass grave. He attended their burial and returned to his much-battered village on 15 August - just over a month after his wife and two children were killed and in time for their final interment on 24 August. He found his house partially destroyed in the Israeli bombardment along with the van and its Hizbollah rockets. "Every day is worse than the one before for me," Mohamed says.
And he blames the world. The UN for giving no protection to his family, Hizbollah's "vanity" in starting a war with a more powerful enemy and the Israelis for destroying the life of his family. "Is Israel in a state of war with children? We need an answer, a response to f this question. We ask for a trial for this Israeli pilot who killed the children. He is a war criminal because he killed innocents for no reason. And what has happened? The south has been destroyed. The people were massacred. The Israelis were back on the soil of my land. I could see them when we buried Zahra and Hadi and Myrna. How can I lose my children and then see the Israelis here? We are ignored by the government and treated with neglect by the media and the political parties - including the Hizbollah - who were the cause of what happened."
Almost all the "martyr" pictures of the dead of Marwahin contain a ghostly photograph of Rafiq Hariri, the mightest Sunni Muslim of them all, who was assassinated last year. The martyrs of Marwahin have become identified with a man who sought peace rather than war with Israel. But at the graveyard on the edge of the tobacco-growing village, there is no end to mourning. I found two old women sitting beside the graves, weeping and beating themselves and pulling at their hair. One of them was Ali Kemal's wife.
Adel Abdullah took me round the graves. His sister-in-law Mariam lies in one of them, her body still containing the unborn child she was carrying when she died. So are her five children, Ali, 14, Hamad, 12, Hussein, 10, Hassan, eight, and two-year-old Lama.
"This is Myrna," Adel says, patting his hand gently on the concrete surface of the little girl's still unadorned grave. "This is Zahra, her mother, whom we put just behind her. And here is Hadi." The villagers have written their first names in Arabic in the concrete. "There is Naame Ghanem and her two children. And this is the grave of both Fatmi and Zeinab because we could not tell which bits of them belonged together. That is why the 23 dead of Marwahin have only 22 graves."
On the dirt road to the cemetery on the windy little hill above the village, there still lies a face mask worn by the young men carrying the decomposing bodies to their final grave. And just to the left of the dead, clearly visible to the Israeli settlers in their homes across the border, the villagers have left the remains of Ali Kemal Abdullah's Daihatsu pick-up. It is punctured by a hundred shrapnel holes, bent and distorted and burned. The children in this vehicle had no chance, killed outright or smashed to pieces as they lay wounded afterwards.
"If it is right that these people should be martyred in this way, well fine," Adel says to me. "If not, why did this crime take place? Why can't a country - a single country, your country - say that Israel was responsible for a war crime? But no, you are silent." A woman, watching Adel's anger, was more eloquent. "The problem," she said, "is that these poor people belonged to a country called Lebanon and our lives are worth nothing to anyone else. If this had happened in Israel - if all these children were Israeli and the Hizbollah had killed them all with a helicopter - the US president would travel to the cemetery each year for a memorial service and there would be war crimes trials and the world would denounce this crime. But no president is going to come to Marwahin. There will be no trials."
Mohamed al-Abdullah weeps beside his wounded son in Beirut. "I consider this to have been a useless war and with these atrocious massacres it is innocent civilians who paid the price. Those who died are resting but we who are living are paying a price every day. That price is paid by the living who suffer. Why should I pay the price of something I didn't choose? I will say just one thing to you. God have mercy on Rafiq Hariri, a man of education and reconstruction. In God's name, I hope his children walk in his path. My wife loved Sheikh Rafiq so much. In this house, my wife's whole life changed after his assassination. Before, Zahra was not interested in politics but from the day his car was bombed, she listened to the news every day. Before bed, she wanted to hear any news. And she said to me once, 'I hope I don't die, so I will know who killed Rafiq Hariri'."
A UN investigation is still underway into Hariri's murder. An Israeli investigation is to start into the disastrous performance of its army during the war. The Hizbollah still claims it won a "divine victory" in July and August of this year. UNIFIL, which turned the refugees of Marwahin away on 15 July, stated that when they were removing the children's bodies, their soldiers came under fire. Human Rights Watch is still investigating the killings of civilians at Marwahin and other locations and wrote of them before the war ended. "The Israeli military," it said in its initial report, "did not follow its orders [to civilians] to evacuate with the creation of safe passage routes, and on a daily basis Israeli warplanes and helicopters struck civilians in cars who were trying to flee, many with white flags out the windows, a widely accepted sign of civilian status ... On some days, Israeli war planes hit dozens of civilian cars, showing a clear pattern of failing to distinguish between civilian and military objects." International law makes it clear that it is forbidden in any circumstances to carry out direct attacks against civilians and that to do so is a war crime. Human Rights Watch states that "war crimes" include "making the civilian population or individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities the object of attack".
Lama Abdullah was the youngest victim of the Marwahin 23. Ali Kemal's wife Sabaha was in her eighties. At least six of the children were between the ages of one and 10. The Israeli helicopter pilot's name is, of course, unknown.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1769991.ece
The New York Times
Senate Passes Detainee Bill Sought by Bush
By KATE ZERNIKE
September 28, 2006
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — The Senate approved legislation this evening governing the interrogation and trials of terror suspects, establishing far-reaching new rules in the definition of who may be held and how they should be treated.
The vote, 65-to-34, came after more than 10 hours of often impassioned debate touching on the Constitution, the horrors of Sept. 11 and the nation’s role in the world, but it was also underscored by a measure of politics as Congress prepares to break for the final month of campaigning before closely fought midterm elections.
The legislation sets up rules for the military commissions that will allow the government to prosecute high-level terrorists including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It strips detainees of a habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions in court and broadly defines what kind of treatment of detainees is prosecutable as a war crime.
The bill was a compromise between the White House and three Republican senators who had pushed back against what they saw as President Bush’s attempt to rewrite the nation’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions. But while the president had to relent on some of the key specifics, it allowed him to claim victory in achieving one of his main legislative priorities.
“As our troops risk their lives to fight terrorism, this bill will ensure they are prepared to defeat today’s enemies and address tomorrow’s threats,” Mr. Bush said in a statement shortly after the vote.
A similar bill was passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday by a vote of 253 to 168, and the measure should be ready to go to Mr. Bush by the end of the week for his signature.
Republicans argued that the new rules would provide the necessary tools to fight a new kind of enemy. “Our prior concept of war has been completely altered, as we learned so tragically on September 11th, 2001,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia. “And we must address threats in a different way.”
Democrats argued that the rules were being rushed through for political gain too close to a major election, that they would fundamentally threaten the foundations of the American legal system, and that they would come back to haunt lawmakers as one of the greatest mistakes in history.
“I believe there can be no mercy for those who perpetrated the crimes of 9/11,” said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York. “But in the process of accomplishing what I believe is essential for our security, we must hold onto our values and set an example that we can point to with pride, not shame.”
Twelve Democrats crossed party lines to support the legislation, while one Republican, Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, opposed it. Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, did not vote.
Mr. Bush attacked Democrats for voting against the legislation even before the vote began, signaling Republicans’ intention to use it as a hammer in their efforts to portray themselves as the party of strength on national security.
But provisions of the bill came under criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats, with several of them crossing lines on some amendments to the bill that failed along narrow margins.
Among the amendments that failed were one that would have struck the habeas corpus provision, one that would have established a sunset on the legislation to allow Congress to reconsider it in five years, and one that would have require the Central Intelligence Agency to submit to Congressional oversight.
A fourth amendment would have required the State Department to inform other nations of what interrogation techniques it considers illegal for use on American troops, a move intended to prompt the administration to say publicly what techniques it considers out of bounds.
Senator Carl M. Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, argued that the habeas corpus provision “is as legally abusive of the rights guaranteed in the Constitution as the actions at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and secret prisons were physically abusive of detainees.”
And even some Republicans who said voted for the bill said they expected the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation because of the habeas corpus provision, ultimately sending the legislation right back to Congress.
“We should have done it right, because we’re going to have to do it again,” said Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, who had voted to strike the habeas corpus provision, yet supported the bill.
The legislation broadens the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in this country as well as those in foreign countries, and also anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense.
It strips detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, of a habeas right to challenge their detention in court, relying instead on procedures known as combatant status review trials, which have looser rules of evidence than the courts.
It allows evidence seized in this country or abroad to be taken without a search warrant. It bars evidence obtained by cruel and inhumane treatment, except that obtained before Dec, 30, 2005, when Congress enacted the Detainee Treatment Act. Democrats charged that the date was set conveniently after the worst abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay.
The legislation establishes several “grave breaches” of Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions that are felonies under the War Crimes Act, including torture, rape, murder and any act intended to cause “serious” physical or mental pain or suffering.
It leaves to the president the definition of specific interrogation techniques and rules barring any techniques that do not rise to the level of grave breaches.
The issue was sent to Congress as a result of a Supreme Court decision in June that struck down military tribunals the Bush administration had established shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The court ruled that the tribunals violated the Constitution, and it upended the president’s claim that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war on terror.
The White House submitted another bill in early September, setting off weeks of intraparty fighting as the three Senate Republicans, John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, insisted they would not support a provision that in any way appeared to alter the nation’s commitments under Geneva.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/washington/29detaincnd.html?
_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin
The Observer:
White House in crisis over 'Iraq lies' claims
Watergate journalist's new book exposes how Bush has kept the US public in the dark about the true costs of the 'war on terror'
Paul Harris in New York
Sunday October 1, 2006
President George Bush was braced for one of the toughest fights of his political life yesterday as a fierce row broke out over whether he has been misleading the American public over the worsening violence in Iraq. The crisis also rippled across the Atlantic with claims that the administration hid crucial Iraq intelligence from its British allies.
Sparking the crisis was a series of leaks from a hard-hitting new book by the political journalist Bob Woodward, one of the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal that engulfed the Nixon administration three decades ago.
The author's first television interview on the Iraq book is due to be shown this evening on the CBS show 60 Minutes, and is expected to ignite a huge row over the conduct of the war. The book lifts the lid on an administration in crisis, claiming that Bush and his top officials have deliberately covered up the seriousness of the violence in the war-torn country.
Woodward has so far been sympathetic to the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq.
In the TV interview Woodward accuses Bush of keeping the real situation in Iraq secret from the American public and playing down the true level of violence. 'There's public [information] and there's private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it secret. No one is supposed to know,' he says.
His book - State of Denial - is also understood to say Tony Blair was angry at discovering that Washington was keeping key intelligence on Iraq from Britain - even classifying reports based partly on contributions from British operatives as off-limits. In some cases, British personnel flying US planes in Iraq were denied access to pilots' manuals, the book reportedly alleges. Downing Street denied to comment last night.
Woodward's book says that insurgent attacks in Iraq are now running at a rate of about four an hour and that officials believe the situation will get worse next year. That allegation is particularly damaging to the administration, which has staked its reputation in mid-term Congressional elections on its ability to win the war. It also flies in the face of regular Republican claims that the situation in Iraq is improving.
Woodward's book also provides a gripping insider's account of a White House deeply divided over Iraq. It shows that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been at odds with Bush over the war and that former White House chief of staff Andy Card had backed the replacement of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - but was overruled.
It portrays Bush as determined to stick it out even if his only supporters are whittled down to his wife and the White House dog. 'I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me,' Woodward quotes Bush as having told top Republicans at a White House meeting.
The book could not have come at a worse time for the Republican party. America is gearing up for vital elections and both parties are fighting on the issue of national security. That is usually a Republican strength, but Woodward's book will undermine the idea that the ruling party is best at prosecuting the war.
Bush spokesman Tony Snow has denied one key allegation - that Rumsfeld no longer takes calls from Rice. 'That is ridiculous,' Snow said. The White House has also insisted that the war in Iraq remains a vital part of the wider war on terror. In his weekly radio address, Bush said that fighting Islamic militants was part of winning the struggle against terrorists.
He also slammed Democrats and others who used a leaked intelligence report last week - which warned that invading Iraq had made America more prone to terrorist attack - to score political points against Bush's Iraq policy. 'Some in Washington have selectively quoted from this document to make the case that, by fighting the terrorists in Iraq, we are making our people less secure here at home. This argument buys into the enemy's propaganda.'
But it is now far from clear that such arguments are resonating with the American public.
The Democrats, who once shied away from any debate on national security, have started to make it the central plank of their mid-term campaign. The party pulled no punches yesterday in responding to Bush's radio speech by choosing the Democratic Congressional candidate Tammy Duckworth to give its official response. Duckworth is a helicopter pilot who lost both legs in Iraq and now is a candidate for a seat in Illinois.
She vigorously attacked Republican attempts to paint her party as 'cutting and running' from the war. 'I believe the brave men and women who are serving in Iraq today, their families and the American people, deserve more than the same empty slogans and political name-calling,' Duckworth said.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1884879,00.html
The Observer:
155 feared dead in Amazon aircrash
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sunday October 1, 2006
A desperate search for survivors was under way deep in the Amazon rainforest yesterday after a Boeing 737 with 155 people on board crashed, after apparently being in collision with a private jet.
Last night, all 149 passengers and six crew members were presumed dead after the Gol Airlines budget flight between Manaus and Brasilia disappeared from radar screens on Friday afternoon over dense jungle. Reports yesterday suggested the plane had plummeted nose-first into the jungle in the worst air disaster in Brazilian history.
Several foreigners are thought to have been on board, among them an 11-month-old baby, a Canadian citizen and 20 employees of the Japanese multinational Yamaha.
Five helicopters and eight air force planes were scouring the remote crash site yesterday afternoon, as anxious families and friends of passengers gathered at Rio de Janeiro's international airport seeking information.
At 9.30am yesterday, fragments of wreckage were spotted around 2,000km north-east of Rio de Janeiro by Brazilian air force spotter planes. Jose Carlos Pereira, the president of Brazil's airport authorities, said there were unlikely to be any survivors.
'It is very difficult to have survivors with such an impact,' Pereira told reporters in Brasilia. He said the plane appeared to have fallen in a 'vertical position'.
There was still confusion over reports suggesting the Boeing 737-800 had been hit by a mystery private jet, apparently piloted by an American, somewhere over the state of Mato Grosso.
With about 300 rescue workers still struggling to reach the isolated crash site, details of what happened were scarce yesterday. Officials said the Boeing disappeared from radar screens somewhere over Sao Felix do Xingu, a remote frontier town.
Ademir Ribeiro, an employee of a remote farm near the crash site, told Brazilian television that his colleagues had seen the plane just before it came down.
'The people here saw a large plane making strange movements and losing altitude,' he told Reuters.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1884877,00.html
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