Daily Archives: September 3, 2009

GOP support may be vital to Obama on Afghan war

GOP support may be vital to Obama on Afghan war
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, September 3, 2009

As President Obama prepares to decide whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan, the political climate appears increasingly challenging for him, leaving him in the awkward position of relying on the Republican Party, and not his own, for support.

The simple political narrative of the Afghanistan war — that this was the good war, in which the United States would hunt down the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks — has faded over time, with popular support ebbing, American casualties rising and confidence in the Afghan government declining. In addition, Afghanistan’s disputed election, and the attendant fraud charges that have been lodged against President Hamid Karzai, are contributing further to the erosion of public support.

A CBS News poll released on Tuesday reports that 41 percent of those polled wanted troop levels in Afghanistan decreased, compared with 33 percent in April. Far fewer people — 25 percent — wanted troop levels increased, compared with 39 percent in April. And Mr. Obama’s approval rating for his handling of Afghanistan has dropped eight points since April, to 48 percent. [continued…]

Afghan vote results likely to be delayed
By Pamela Constable and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, September 3, 2009

Afghanistan’s volatile presidential election process moved closer to violent confrontation Wednesday, even as officials said releasing the final results from the Aug. 20 polls would be further delayed because of slow vote counting and an even slower effort to investigate hundreds of fraud complaints.

The tension was exacerbated by a suicide bombing outside a mosque in the capital of northeastern Laghman province Wednesday morning. A senior official of the national intelligence service and 23 others were killed; scores were wounded.

Election officials announced Wednesday that President Hamid Karzai, who is seeking reelection, had widened his lead over the main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, an ophthalmologist and former foreign minister. With about 3.7 million valid votes from 60 percent of polling stations tallied, they said, Karzai leads Abdullah 47.2 to 32.5 percent. [continued…]

Karzai’s election victory seen as inevitable, despite claims of fraud
By Charles Bremner and James Hider, The Times, September 3, 2009

Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, dismissed as fantasy the reports that Washington was seeking a run-off against Dr Abdullah. “We have no candidates and no preference as to a first-round victory or a run-off,” Mr Holbrooke said. It was up to the Electoral Complaints Commission to rule on the fraud claims before the final result was proclaimed this month. “The post-election phase, the phase of determining who won, is going to be critical in determining the future of Afghanistan,” he said.

Mr Holbrooke and others among the 27 international envoys played down the likely scope of the irregularities. Many of the 2,500 complaints referred to the same incidents, they said.

“During the process, there will be many claims of irregularities,” Mr Holbrooke said. “That happens in democracies, even when they are not in the middle of a war.”

Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, acknowledged concern but said that the election had been a triumph “at a time of serious danger for each of the men and women who dipped their fingers in ink to vote”. [continued…]

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CIA doctors face human experimentation claims

CIA doctors face human experimentation claims
By Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, September 2, 2009

Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its “enhanced interrogation” of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood.

PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA’s secret “torture programme”. [continued…]

Calling Hannah Arendt
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, September 2, 2009

The mind-numbing bureaucratic details displayed in the documents released last week on the Bush Administration’s abusive detention program sent wise commentators, such as The Atlantic’s Hanna Rosin, to Hannah Arendt, the mother of all war-crime writers. Her observations, first published in this magazine, on what she eventually dubbed the “banality of evil,” exhibited by the Nazis’ tidy, carefully monitored control of the Final Solution, are, sadly, timeless.

This is not to suggest that there is any moral equivalence between the Nazis and the Bush Administration. That would be absurd. Nevertheless, as C.I.A. bureaucrats debated the appropriate temperature of the water with which they planned to fill the lungs of captives or the number of times prisoners could be propelled head-first into a plywood wall (“twenty to thirty times consecutively”), it’s hard not to have renewed appreciation for Arendt.

There is also a less famous observation by Arendt, made in The New York Review of Books in the wake of the protests of 1968 and shared with me by Georgetown Law professor David Luban, that captures the problem faced by the Obama Administration in its attempt to hold the right officials accountable. She calls it the “rule by Nobody.” Attorney General Eric Holder is stuck trying to investigate an entire bureaucracy. Those on the top can claim to have clean hands, while those on the bottom can claim they were following ostensibly legal orders. What’s left, Arendt suggests, is an all-powerful government that is beyond accountability. [continued…]

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A nuclear deadline looms for Iran — and for Obama

A nuclear deadline looms for Iran — and for Obama
By Tony Karon, Time, September 3, 2009

President Barack Obama took office promising to pursue a diplomatic solution to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear program, but so far, he’s gotten little out of Tehran. So little, in fact, that the President has given Iran a Sept. 15 deadline to respond positively to his offer of negotiations, or face a heightening of sanctions. As U.S. officials huddled with European, Russian and Chinese counterparts in Germany on Wednesday to review the issue, Iran signaled that it will, indeed, respond — by offering its own package of proposals to achieve a diplomatic resolution to the standoff. Western leaders at the meeting in Germany urged Iran to agree to a meeting with Russia, China, the key European nations and the U.S. before Sept. 23. But nobody is expecting Iran’s proposals to come close to meeting current Western demands, and that could leave Obama facing the unenviable choice either of being painted as feckless, or else moving down a road of escalation that puts a diplomatic solution further beyond reach. [continued…]

Iran’s flip-flopper supreme
By Roger Cohen, New York Times, September 3, 2009

Will the real Ayatollah Ali Khamenei please stand up?

On June 19, a week after Iran’s disputed presidential election, the supreme leader shed the garb of the lofty arbiter to deliver a raging sermon in which he warned of “bloodshed and chaos” in Tehran if protests continued. They did, the next day, and I will never forget the blood that flowed at Khamenei’s behest.

Khamenei, abandoning the plausible deniability of the Prophet’s avatar, opting instead for perilous political partisanship, said then: “Please see the hungry wolves in ambush who are gradually removing their mask of diplomacy to show their true faces.” He identified the most evil of these foreign wolves as “the British government,” no less.

Now, 10 weeks later, with the Iranian revolutionary establishment still shaken by the brazenness of the June 12 electoral fraud and the rashness of the supreme leader’s gambit, Khamenei declares: “I don’t accuse the leaders of the recent incidents of being affiliated with foreign countries, including the United States and Britain, since the issue has not been proven to me.”

Well, sir, which is it? [continued…]

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Norway fund expels Israel firm for barrier work

Norway fund expels Israel firm for barrier work
Reuters, September 3, 2009

Norway’s $400 billion-plus wealth fund has excluded Israeli company Elbit Systems (ESLT.TA) for supplying surveillance equipment for the separation barrier in the West Bank, the government said on Thursday.

“We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law,” Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said in a statement.

“The freedom of movement of the people living in the occupied territory has been unacceptably restricted,” she said.

Halvorsen said the International Court of Justice has said the barrier construction breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention and that “Norwegian authorities act in accordance with this.” [continued…]

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