Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Globalization is killing the globe: return to local economies

Thom Hartmann on how globalization has resulted in a new form of feudalism:

Globalization is killing Europe, just as it’s already wiped out much of the American middle class.

Spain and Greece are facing immediate crises that many other European nations see on the near horizon: aging boomer workers are retiring with healthy benefit packages, but the younger workers who are paying for those benefits aren’t making anything close to the income (or, therefore, paying the taxes) that their parents did.

Globalists/corporatists/conservative “free market” and “flat earth” advocates say this is a great opportunity to cut benefits for the old folks (and for the young folks in the future), thus bringing the countries budgets back into balance, and this story is the main corporate media storyline.

But it overlooks the real issue (and the real solution): how globalization is killing these nations’ economies and what can be done about it.

The Observer reports on Greece’s parasitic elite who are taking their money and running:

A staggering €8bn-€10bn (£7bn-£8.7bn) may have been taken out of Greece by private investors since it became engulfed by economic turmoil in November.

Under pressure from the European Union and international markets to rein in the nation’s €300bn debt, socialist prime minister, George Papandreou, announced last week that he would have to enforce tough deficit-cutting measures. But the coming austerity package is leading panicked wealthy Greeks to divert their savings out of the country.

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The world capital of killing

Nicholas Kristof writes from Congo:

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors like Jeanne Mukuninwa, a beautiful, cheerful young woman of 19 who somehow musters the courage to giggle.

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What would Erik Prince advise?

The New York Times reports:

An Iraqi militant group said it had abducted an American contractor, a day after the United States military reported that a contractor had been missing since Jan. 23. It would be the first reported kidnapping of an American in a year in Iraq.

The militant group posted a video to back up its claim, although the man in the video does not give his name.

The Department of Defense identified the missing man as Issa T. Salomi, 60, of El Cajon, Calif. In a statement on Friday, the military said he worked as a contractor for American forces and was last seen on Jan. 23 in Baghdad. Search efforts were under way, the statement said.

There was no way to immediately confirm the authenticity of the video or that the man pictured was Mr. Salomi.

The reports of an abduction raise fresh fears that despite an improvement in security in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, foreigners working here are still vulnerable to kidnapping.

In the video, the captured man, wearing what appeared to be an American military uniform, identified the abductors as the League of Righteous, a Shiite Muslim militant group, and said they were treating him “kindly.” He said his kidnappers were demanding the release of other militants from jail and the prosecution of former Blackwater security guards accused in a shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead in 2007.

“The second demand is to bring the proper justice and the proper punishment to those members of Blackwater company that have committed unjustifiable crimes against innocent Iraqi civilians,” the man said in a transcript of the video posted on a Web site used by Iraqi insurgent groups. The man in the video said his captors were demanding “proper compensation to the families that have been involved in great suffering because of this incident.”

If the Obama administration has any interest in really dealing with the Blackwater legacy in a significant way, it’s time that it develops a case for the criminal prosecution of Erik Prince. Otherwise, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, groups like the League of Righteous will continue to have all the political ammunition they need to justify kidnapping Americans.

But the chances are, Prince still doesn’t need to fear arrest. Instead, most likely, another secret deal will be cut resulting in another prisoner exchange.

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How the CIA became dumb and dangerous

Melvin A Goodman and Philip Giraldi — former CIA officers with decades of experience — both agree that the agency’s focus on paramilitary operations has undermined its core intelligence mission.

Giraldi writes:

It has been observed that no countries on the earth but the United States and Israel claim extraterritoriality, i.e. the right to seize or attack anyone anywhere and at any time based on evidence that is secret. The foul-up at Base Chapman [in which seven CIA officers were killed in a suicide attack] is reflective of the transformation of CIA into a Washington-sanctioned retribution machine, something not unlike the terrorist groups that it claims to oppose rather than an intelligence agency. It is telling that after the slaughter at Base Chapman senior Agency officers immediately announced that they would get revenge and the pace of drone attacks has dramatically increased, killing few or no actual terrorists but many civilians and further destabilizing an already tottering Pakistan. The broader problems that the Agency is experiencing are revealed in CIA’s eight years of largely unrewarding effort against “international terrorism,” a symptom of a systemic failure to understand much less identify and penetrate groups that are, ironically, constantly looking for volunteers to fill their ranks. CIA’s traditional strength in recruiting agents and collecting intelligence has all but disappeared, subsumed into a paramilitary mission to launch hellfire missile firing drones, which is also almost certainly a reflection of the White House’s perception of what needs to be done. If that is so, the tactic is ultimately self defeating in that it produces more enemies that it is able to eliminate, making failure in Afghanistan an absolute certainty.

Likewise, Goodman says:

In a democracy, where laws are derived from broad principles of right and wrong and where those principles are protected by agreed procedures, it is not in the interest of the state to flout those procedures at home, or to permit extra-legal activities abroad, which have complicated the task of maintaining credible relations with our allies in the battle against terrorism.

The CIA’s most important mission remains the preparation of independent analysis of international issues for senior decision makers; therefore, it is essential to protect the integrity of objective and balanced intelligence. The CIA gives far too much attention to support for the Pentagon and to current intelligence. In the past, CIA analysis served to contradict or at least temper the worst-case analysis of the Pentagon, but this is no longer the case.

President Harry Truman created the CIA to produce strategic intelligence that was not beholden to policy and political interests; President Obama must restore this mission.

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Can Obama take charge?

Paul Krugman describes the current crisis in Washington and its parallels with the collapse of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century:

…given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism.

It should be a simple message (and it should have been the central message in Massachusetts): a vote for a Republican, no matter what you think of him as a person, is a vote for paralysis. But by now, we know how the Obama administration deals with those who would destroy it: it goes straight for the capillaries. Sure enough, Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, accused Mr. Shelby of “silliness.” Yep, that will really resonate with voters.

After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually — after the country’s post-World War I resurrection — became the country’s national anthem. It begins, “Poland is not yet lost.”

Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.

The problem with locating the root of the problem in what has become a dysfunctional Senate, is that it turns the administration into a victim. Krugman might bemoan the White House’s ineffectual defense mechanisms but he’s essentially sidelining the heart of the problem: a weak president.

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‘When Guantanamo walked in the door, Rahm walked out’

In her New Yorker piece on Attorney General Eric Holder and the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial, Jane Mayer describes White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel’s role in blocking the investigation of torture by the CIA:

Emanuel viewed many of the legal problems that [Greg] Craig [Obama’s first White House counsel] and Holder were immersed in as distractions. “When Guantánamo walked in the door, Rahm walked out,” the informed source said. Holder and Emanuel had been collegial since their Clinton Administration days. Holder’s wife, Sharon Malone, an obstetrician, had delivered one of Emanuel’s children. But Emanuel adamantly opposed a number of Holder’s decisions, including one that widened the scope of a special counsel who had begun investigating the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Bush had appointed the special counsel, John Durham, to assess whether the C.I.A. had obstructed justice when it destroyed videotapes documenting waterboarding sessions. Holder authorized Durham to determine whether the agency’s abuse of detainees had itself violated laws. Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community. But Holder, who had studied law at Columbia with Telford Taylor, the chief American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, was profoundly upset after seeing classified documents explicitly describing C.I.A. prisoner abuse. The United Nations Convention Against Torture requires the U.S. to investigate credible torture allegations. Holder felt that, as the top law-enforcement officer in the U.S., he had to do something.

Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, “Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?”

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The apartheid will end when Israelis have to face its cost

At The National, Tony Karon wrote:

The former US president Jimmy Carter set off a firestorm in 2006 when he said that Israel would have to choose between maintaining an apartheid occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians. That Mr Carter brokered Israel’s most important peace treaty with an Arab country was immaterial; he was branded an enemy of Israel, an anti-Semite and even a Holocaust-denier.

Israel’s friends in the US reacted out of instinct, knowing that an association with apartheid – South Africa’s erstwhile system of racial oppression – would bring international condemnation and isolation. But there was no word of protest from that quarter last week when Israel’s defence minister said what Mr Carter had. “If, and as long as between the Jordan (River) and the (Mediterranean) Sea there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic,” warned Ehud Barak, speaking at Israel’s annual Herzliya security conference. “If the Palestinians vote in elections it is a binational state and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”

Which, of course, is exactly what Mr Carter was arguing. The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned in November 2007 that without a two-state solution, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights”, which it would be unable to win because American Jews would not support a state that denies voting rights to all of its subjects.

Haaretz reports that the UN is likely to to refer the findings of the Goldstone report to the International Court of Justice in The Hague:

A decision to bring the report on last year’s Gaza war before the court would follow a debate in the UN General Assembly over Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s response to the document last week.

Assembly president Ali Abdussalam Treki announced on Saturday that member states were drawing up a plan of action over Ban’s answer to the report, in which retired South African Judge Richard Goldstone accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.

Treki, a senior Libyan diplomat, did not give a target date for a debate by the assembly – but the tone of his press release implied that he would push for a full discussion of the issue, diplomats said.

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Iran ratchets up atom work despite sanctions threat

Reuters reports:

Iran’s president gave instructions on Sunday for the production of higher-grade nuclear reactor fuel, prompting the United States and Germany to threaten carefully targeted new sanctions against Tehran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s announcement raised the stakes in Iran’s dispute with the West, but he said talks were still possible on a nuclear swap offer by world powers designed to allay fears the Islamic Republic is making an atomic bomb.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the response by Iran, a major oil exporter which says its nuclear program is to make electricity and not bombs, was very disappointing.

Deutsche Welle added:

US Senator Joe Lieberman, who heads the Senate Committe on Homeland Security, told the German Press Agency dpa that the world faces a choice between imposing tough sanctions against Iran or launching a military strike.

Lieberman was the last speaker of the day on Saturday and obviously frustrated at the Iranian Foreign Minister’s late-night speech on Friday didn’t mince his words.

“We have a choice here: to go to tough economic sanctions to make diplomacy work or we will face the prospect of military action against Iran,” Lieberman said.

That is because a nuclear-armed Iran would create chaos in the Middle East, send oil prices soaring and shatter any hope of an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said.

“They should just accept the existing (IAEA) proposal,” Lieberman told dpa.

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School bombing exposes Obama’s secret war inside Pakistan

The Times:

The discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.

Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.

US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We’re quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said.

For the past month drones have pounded the tribal region of North Waziristan in apparent retaliation for the murder of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan by a Jordanian suicide bomber working with the Pakistani Taliban.

At TomDispatch, Pratap Chatterjee wrote:

In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy,” comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that U.S. military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.

A more provocative — and perhaps more ominous — analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent.

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Why the U.S. is back on the road to Damascus

Time magazine on the new phase in US-Syrian relations:

Unlike many U.S. embassies in the Arab world that have been forced by security concerns to move from the center of capital cities to fortress-like suburban compounds, the Damascus embassy still occupies prime real estate — just a stone’s throw from the residence of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Syria’s much feared state security apparatus keeps close tabs on everyone entering and leaving the embassy, but it also helps keeps the embassy relatively safe from the occasional jihadist sneak attack. In turn, living close to the Americans may also help Assad sleep more easily at night, say Damascene wags, because the proximity of the embassy would make the U.S. and Israel think twice about every trying to dropping a bomb on him.

But news that the embassy is set, for the first time in five years, to have have a resident ambassador is a sign that the “can’t live with ’em/can’t live without ’em” U.S.-Syrian relationship is about to enter a new phase. The State Department has presented the credentials of Robert Ford, former U.S. Deputy Ambassador to Iraq, to the Syrian government for approval as ambassador in Damascus, according to the Syrian government. The Ambassador’s residence in Damascus has been empty ever since the Bush Administration accused the Assad regime of orchestrating the 2005 assassination of Lebanese former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and removed then-Ambassor Margaret Scobey in protest.

Haaretz reported:

Syria is ready to respond to Israeli “aggression”, Syrian Minister of Information Mohsen Bilal said Sunday, in an escalating war of words between the two countries.

Speaking at a seminar near the Israeli border, Bilal said that Syria would “stand in the face of Israeli ambitions.”

Speaking just kilometres from the Golan Heights – a strategically important plateau at the intersection of Israel, Syria and Lebanon seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War – Bilal said the contentious area was at “the core” of Syria’s interests and vowed it would return to Syria.

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Questioning the New York Times

When Electronic Intifada contacted the New York Times‘ Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner to ask him if it was true his son had just joined the Israeli army and if so whether he thought this would create a conflict of interest, the newspaper avoided giving a straight answer. It gave what has become so familiar — a response which in the paper’s scrupulously measured but condescending tone implicitly said: who are you to question our judgment?

“Mr. Bronner’s son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner’s coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.”

To be oblique and not simply say, yes, Bronner’s son is in the IDF, but to instead say he “makes his own decisions,” is in effect to say: What gives you the audacity Mr Abunimah to think that we should be obliged to directly answer your meddlesome questions?

Similarly, the paper’s own public editor Clark Hoyt gets waved off by executive editor Bill Keller who simultaneously clearly feels obliged to pay mock homage to the public editor’s role. Lest readers be confused because they thought Hoyt is what the paper says — “the readers’ representative” — Keller gets all slimy and says that he actually has more respect for the readers than does Hoyt and that’s why Bronner won’t be getting reassigned. Keller, unlike Hoyt (Keller claims), believes that the paper’s readers are fully capable of distinguishing between appearance and reality. In this case that presumably means that they can see that the appearance of a conflict of interest for Ethan Bronner does not correspond with an actual conflict of interest.

There is one factual point, central to the discussion, that Hoyt gets wrong when he quotes a reader:

Linda Mamoun of Boulder, Colo., wrote that although she found Bronner’s coverage “impressively well-written and relatively even-handed,” his position “should not be held by anyone with military ties to the state of Israel.” His son has the direct ties, not Bronner. But is that still too close for comfort?

Actually, the reader was right: it is Bronner, not his son, who has ties to the state of Israel.

As minister of defense, Ehud Barak does not have ties to the state of Israel. He is part of the state. Likewise Bronner’s son, who happens to be at the other end of the chain of command, is now just as much a part of the state.

As for the question about the potential conflict of interest, I don’t take it as a given that Bronner’s connection to the IDF will necessarily cloud his judgment. On the contrary, it could sharpen his focus.

The next time Israel makes its case for war, Bronner may stand at risk of losing a son. Maybe that will drive this reporter to pose tougher questions.

On the other hand, when it comes to the IDF’s policy of seeking zero risk for Israeli soldiers, it’s hard to imagine Bronner covering that issue with any semblance of impartiality.

Ultimately, the story here is the perennial story of the New York Times. It’s not about conflicts of interest as much as it’s about the paper’s unremitting disdain towards its critics.

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The inner circle that is destroying the Obama presidency


From the Financial Times:

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

Steve Clemons, who provides an extended analysis of the FT piece, comments that unless Obama swiftly installs a Team B, “the Obama brand will be totally bust in the very near term.”

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Gates scoffs at Iran nuclear claim

The New York Times reports:

As Iran’s foreign minister met with the chief of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency here, the United States and Germany rejected Iran’s assertion that it was close to accepting an international compromise on its nuclear program.

Western officials expressed deep skepticism toward Tehran’s contention that a deal was close for having uranium enriched abroad for Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, said that the Iranians presented no new proposal or counterproposal during a meeting on the sidelines of a security conference here Saturday.

“Dialogue is continuing,” Mr. Amano said. “It should be accelerated. That’s the point.”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that actions by Iranian leaders did not back up their conciliatory public statements. “Based on the information that I have, I don’t have the sense we are close to an agreement,” he said at the conclusion of talks with Turkish leaders in Ankara.

Julian Borger adds:

The Tehran government has a gift for the theatrical. The arrival of the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, at the Munich Security Conference was confirmed at the very last moment, and since he got here, Mottaki has held it in the palm of his hand. On Friday night he claimed a deal on Iran’s uranium was close, but then added that it was up to Iran to decide how much of its enriched uranium would be included in the deal. Jam tomorrow, but perhaps not very much.

Today, Mottaki elaborated on his theme at some length, without saying a whole lot more. Asked whether Iran was still willing to export the 1200 kg of low enriched uranium (LEU) provisionally agreed in Geneva last October, he slipped into the opaque language of the bazaar.

It is very common in business, for the buyer to talk about the quantity, while the seller only offers the price. We determine the quantity on the basis of our needs, and we will inform the [international] bodies about our requirements. Maybe it is less than this quantity you have already mentioned [1200kg] or maybe a little more than that quantity that we may need for our reactor.

Mottaki also said that Iran’s nuclear experts had studied the time interval it would take to turn Iranian LEU into 20% enriched uranium in the form of fuel rods, and endorsed that interval. The talk in Geneva was that this would take a year. A few days ago in a television interview, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad talked of four to five months. Mottaki did not make it clear which time-scale he was talking about.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program will neither completely stop Teheran’s nuclear march, nor bring down the ayatollahs’ regime, according to former Swiss ambassador to Iran Tim Guldimann.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on the sidelines of this week’s Herzliya Conference, Guldimann, who knows the Iranian way of thinking well, expressed – as a personal opinion – his deep concern about the military option against Iran.

Guldimann was Swiss ambassador to Iran and Afghanistan from 1999 to 2004. As ambassador to Teheran, Guldimann – now senior adviser and head of the Middle East Project at the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, Geneva – represented US interests in Iran, acting as a go-between. He gained notoriety for a memorandum he transmitted to the US in 2003, which posited an alleged Iranian proposal for a broad dialogue with the US, with everything on the table – including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian armed groups. The proposal was rejected by the Bush administration.

According to Guldimann, the position that unless the international community stops Iran’s nuclear program, Israel would have to do it alone is based on the unproven assumption that Iran will actually go down the road of having a nuclear weapon at its disposal.

“My understanding is that they will not go as far as that. If you say that there is [in Iran] a clear policy of achieving a nuclear capability, I would fully agree. You can define that as a breakout period. But will they make a political decision to produce a bomb? Such a breakout is an absolutely different question,” he says.

The Washington Post says:

China on Thursday threw a roadblock in the path of a U.S.-led push for sanctions against Iran, saying that it is important to continue negotiations as long as Iran appears willing to consider a deal to give up some of its enriched uranium.

“To talk about sanctions at the moment will complicate the situation and might stand in the way of finding a diplomatic solution,” Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said at a conference in Paris.

The Guardian reports:

Iran has launched a ­research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space – showing that the country can defeat the west in the battle of technology and that it will soon send its own astronauts, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saidtoday.

Iranian state television broadcast images of officials placing the animals inside a capsule in the Kavoshgar 3 (explorer in Farsi) rocket before blast-off, although it did not report where or when the launch took place. The Iranian Students News Agency said the capsule had successfully returned to Earth with its “passengers”.

Western powers fear the technology used by Iran’s space programme to launch satellites and research capsules could also be used to build long-range intercontinental missiles. A US defence expert said the launch underlined the closeness of Iran’s space and military programmes.

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U.S. deaths in Pakistan fuel suspicion

Time magazine reports:

By killing three U.S. soldiers in a bomb attack in a remote corner of northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, Feb. 3, the Taliban scored a political jackpot. With anti-American sentiment cresting in Pakistani public opinion, the presence of the three American trainers in a convoy passing through Koto village when it was struck by a roadside bomb has set off a flurry of questions and even wild conspiracy theories about the U.S. presence in the country. The news left Islamabad in a difficult position, deepened suspicion of the U.S. and further strained an already troubled relationship.

The trainers’ presence had been Pakistan’s worst-kept secret. They’re here at the invitation of the paramilitary Frontier Corps, the front-line force in the battle against the Pakistan Taliban, to help improve its poor counterinsurgency capability. In 2008, Washington dispatched 100 military personnel to train Pakistani officers, who would in turn pass on their skills to rank-and-file soldiers; but local sensitivities precluded the Americans from being given direct access to the troops. As U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke told reporters in Washington, “There is nothing secret about their presence there.”

Noah Shachtman adds:

The U.S. military has 200 troops on the ground in Pakistan. That’s about the double the previously-disclosed number of forces there. It’s a whole lot more than the “no American troops in Pakistan” promised by special envoy Richard Holbrooke. And let’s not even get into the number of U.S. intelligence operatives and security contractors on Pakistani soil.

The troop levels are one of a number of details that have emerged about the once-secret U.S. war in Pakistan since three American troops were killed yesterday by an improvised bomb. The New York Times reports that the soldiers were disguised in Pakistani clothing, and their vehicle was outfitted with radio-frequency jammers, meant to stop remotely-detonated bombs. “Still, the Taliban bomber was able to penetrate their cordon. In all 131 people were wounded, most of them girls who were students at a high school adjacent to the site of the suicide attack,” the paper reports.

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There’s real hope from Haiti and it’s not what you expect

Johann Hari:

In the weeks after a disaster like the Haiti earthquake, journalists always search for an upbeat twist to the tale. You know it by now – the baby found alive after a week under wreckage. But this time, a shaft of light has parted the rubble and the corpses and the unshakeable grief that could last for years. In the middle of the Haitian people’s nightmare, a system that has kept hundreds of millions like them poor and broken might just have shown its first fracture.

To understand what has happened, you have to delve into a long-suppressed history – one you are not supposed to hear. Since the 1970s, we have been told that the gospel of the Free Market has rolled out across the world because the People demand it. We have been informed that free elections will lead ineluctably to people choosing to roll back the state, privatise the essentials of life, and leave the rich to work their magic for us all. We have seen these trends wash across the world because ordinary people believe they offer the best possible system.

There’s just one snag: it’s not true. In reality, this gospel has proved impossible to impose in any democracy. Few politicians have believed in its core tenets more than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – yet at the end of their long terms, after bitter battles, the proportion of GDP spent by the state remained the same. Why? Because these doctrines are extremely unpopular, and wherever they are tried, they are fiercely resisted. There are majorities in every free country for a mixed economy, where markets are counter-balanced by a strong and active state.

The gospel spread across the poor world because their governments were given no choice. In her masterpiece The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how these policies were forced on the world’s poor against their will. Sometimes rich governments did it simply by killing the elected leaders and installing a servile dictator, as in Chile. Usually the methods were more subtle.

One of the most marked came in the form of “loans” from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The IMF would approach poor countries and offer them desperately needed cash. But from the 1970s on, they would, in return, require the countries to introduce “structural adjustments” to their economy. The medicine was always the same: end all subsidies for the poor, slash state spending on health and education, deregulate your financial sector, throw your markets open.

Here’s a typical example of what happened next. In Malawi, the country’s soil had become badly depleted, so the government decided to subsidise fertiliser for farmers. When the IMF and World Bank came in, they called this “a market distortion”, and ordered Malawi to stop at once. They did. So the country’s crops failed, and famine scythed through the population. Tens of thousands starved to death. The Malawian government eventually listened to the cries of its people, kicked out the IMF, and reintroduced the subsidies – and the famine stopped that year. The country is now an exporter of food again.

When people are living so close to the edge, even small increases in prices can break them. The IMF systematically disregards the fact that every country that has lifted itself out of poverty has done the opposite of its commands. For example, South Korea went from poverty to plenty in just two generations by protecting and heavily subsiding its industries and jacking up state subsidies – to the IMF’s horror.

Even Professor Jeffrey Sachs – one of their former lackeys – calls the IMF “the Typhoid Mary of emerging markets, spreading recessions in country after country”. So why do they carry on like this? Primarily, it is because IMF programmes work very well – for the rich. They ensure that we get access to the cheapest possible labour and can help ourselves to the glistening resources that inexplicably ended up under their soil.

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The Siddiqui conviction: A verdict ‘based on fear, not on fact’

It should go without saying but yet again needs to be repeated: in an effective justice system, justice not only must be done but it must be seen to be done. In this respect the trial of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, which ended in New York on Wednesday was a miserable failure.

Although most Americans haven’t even heard the name of this MIT-trained neuroscientist, Dr Siddiqui’s case has captured the attention of much of her native Pakistan. Her conviction on two counts of attempted murder quickly led Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari to direct his government to offer her legal assistance.

AP reported:

Pakistanis shouted anti-American slogans and burned the Stars and Stripes on Thursday in protest of a New York jury’s conviction of a Pakistani woman accused of trying to kill Americans while detained in Afghanistan.

The protests drew thousands in at least four cities, demonstrating the widespread distrust, and even hatred, of the U.S. in this country whose cooperation Washington needs to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan.

The New York Times said:

Defense lawyers argued that an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4 [– the rifle allegedly snatched and fired by the accused –] suggested it had not been shot. They used a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18 [the date of the alleged crime].

They also pointed out inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.

Ms. Siddiqui’s lawyers said they had not decided whether to appeal. They suggested that prosecutors had played to New Yorkers’ anxieties about terror attacks.

“This is not a just and right verdict,” Elaine Sharp, one of Ms. Siddiqui’s lawyers, said outside the courtroom. “In my opinion this was based on fear but not fact.”

If the views of jurors were shaped by irrational fears, it seems as though Judge Richard M. Berman suffered the same frailty. Far from recognizing that the conduct of the trial had wider implications for the relations between the US and Pakistan, so-called security considerations meant that journalists with the least interest in covering the case had the best access while those with the greatest interest weren’t allowed into the court room.

As Petra Bartosiewicz reported for Time magazine early in the proceedings:

[Dr Siddiqui’s] case has been major news in much of the Muslim world — and a crush of journalists from Pakistan have been struggling to gain access to a trial hemmed in by security-conscious New York City officials. How the foreign press is able to follow the court proceedings — and thus perceive the fairness of the trial — will have an impact on upcoming high-profile terrorism trials like that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspected 9/11 plotters, likely to be held in the same courthouse as the Siddiqui case.

“If we were able to file a transcript of the proceedings they’d probably print it,” Iftikhar Ali, a reporter with the Associated Press of Pakistan, said of the Siddiqui trial. “That’s how much interest there is in this case.” But Ali, like many other reporters from overseas, has been hampered in gaining access to the live proceedings. Journalists from Pakistan on assigment in New York have been largely excluded from the courtroom. Because of tight restrictions observed by the presiding Judge Richard Berman, not a single Pakistani reporter had been granted a press credential when opening statements began on Tuesday. They were instead sent to an overflow courtroom to watch the proceedings via video link.

In the overflow room this week I met journalists from Pakistan with United Nations and U.S. State Department issued press credentials. They work for some of the biggest outlets in their countries, including BBC Urdu, the Associated Press in Pakistan, Jang, Dawn, Geo and Haj TV. None were issued credentials for the trial, though some had applied weeks ago. We watched the proceedings on a flat screen television. The view didn’t include any of the exhibits being offered into evidence, among them multiple diagrams of the scene of the shooting and incriminating documents allegedly written by Siddiqui. At one point a key government eyewitness stepped off the witness stand and out of range of both the camera and microphone to use a visual aid to demonstrate where he was during the shooting. He was permitted to give much of his testimony off camera.

Ali, who has been at the court every day of the trial — including jury selection — was granted access to the main courtroom for about five minutes on the first day, but was escorted out when court security guards realized he was not on the list of approved media. At the time the only other occupants of the four-row press box, which covers half the available seating in the courtroom with room for about 20 individuals, were one each from the The New York Times, The New York Post and the New York Daily News. The court has officially recognized only media who carry New York Police Department issued press passes, traditionally reserved for reporters who regularly cover crime scenes and certain public events in the city. Out of the approximately 30 such individuals from U.S. news outlets who were eligible to attend the trial, most were not present for opening statements.

“We’ve been coming to all the pretrial hearings and we were never told there was going to be a different system for the trial. We were told the press will be allowed,” Ayesha Tanzeem, a journalist with Voice of America Urdu said. After TIME made inquiries on Thursday, individuals in the overflow room, including the Pakistani journalists, were for the first time ushered into the main courtroom during the afternoon session. But with the exception of a BBC Urdu reporter and a Samaa TV reporter who received official passes, none have been granted a press credential that would guarantee them a seat on future days.

The decision to accept solely the NYPD pass for the Siddiqui trial came from the judge’s chambers, says Elly Harrold of the District Executive’s office, the administrative arm at the federal courthouse. “Of course there are exceptions,” Harrold said, “but I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

Although Siddiqui is not charged with any terrorism-related crime, security concerns are paramount though the procedures seem to be unevenly enforced. During the lunch break on the first day of the Siddiqui trial a group of Muslim men praying in the waiting areas outside the courtroom were afterwards asked to leave the floor. That prevented them from securing a place in line for the afternoon session. Several Muslim women in hijabs were also given similar instructions, but others in the same area, dressed in business attire, including this reporter, were permitted to stay. On the second day of the trial metal detectors were posted outside the courtroom and individuals were asked for photo identification and their names and addresses were logged by court security officers. At the close of proceedings on Thursday defense attorney Charles Swift protested the practice. “The suggestion is that the gallery may be a threat,” said Swift, calling the measure “highly prejudicial.”

If Charles Swift sounds like a familiar name it’s because he has the rare distinction of having stood up and successfully defended his country while its Constitution faced attack from the Bush administration. In Hamdan vs Rumsfeld, Swift won a major victory for the rule of law.

The case of Dr Siddiqui exposes a moral fallacy that has haunted America throughout the war on terrorism. It is this: that injustice is something that can only be done to the innocent.

We have abandoned what used to be the universally recognized foundation of a just legal system: that it treats the guilty and the innocent with fairness and impartiality.

—

(For fascinating background on the Siddiqui case, read Declan Walsh’s November 2009 report in The Guardian.)

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Deal with the Taliban pragmatists — not the elusive ‘moderates’

Michael Semple, a fellow at the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, says that an attempt to cut a deal with the Taliban should not be conceived as an effort to peel away moderates:

The people with whom any deal would have to be done, those Taliban prepared to contemplate accommodation, have a sense of their movement as a moral force that emerged to fight anarchy and corruption in civil war Afghanistan in an honourable tradition of jihad. They are deeply suspicious of apparent US support for the commanders and warlords against whom they were pitted well before 2001. Reluctant to accept that it was the alliance with al-Qaeda which turned the world against them, they resent their labelling as terrorists. They have a host of grievances, from persecution of Taliban who stayed in Afghanistan to the Guantánamo experience and the United Nations blacklists, which they point to as evidence that neither the US nor the Kabul government can be trusted.

Nevertheless, Taliban pragmatists claim they have little problem with an eventual break from al-Qaeda, that they will accommodate other Afghan political forces and that their stance on social issues is unlikely to be a block to agreement. Quizzed on justice and impunity, they protest that their record is no worse than the current Kabul government. The pragmatists do not expect to renounce jihad but to redefine it. They will not surrender but they hope that the Taliban movement might be rehabilitated as a moral Islamic force inside the Afghan political system.

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Netanyahu faces arrest in Hamas hotel murder if Mossad link proved

From The National:

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be at the top of Dubai’s wanted list if the Israeli foreign intelligence service Mossad is proven to be behind the killing of a senior Hamas official, the Dubai Police chief said yesterday.

Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim told The National that “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai. We will issue an
arrest warrant against him.”

He did not, however, assert that Mossad was definitively responsible for the killing; Hamas has accused the Israeli agency of killing Mr al Mabhouh.

The website of Ireland’s Evening Herald reports:

Members of a hit squad who killed a top Hamas military commander used Irish passports to enter and leave Dubai, it’s been claimed.

The suspected Israeli hit team, including at least one woman, entered the United Arab Emirates using Irish documents, police authorities said.

Before jumping to any conclusions about the nationalities of the assassins in Dubai, it’s worth remembering that when Mossad agents attempted to murder Hamas’ political leader Khalid Meshaal in Jordan in 1997, the Israelis were using Canadian passports.

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