Author Archives: Paul Woodward

NEWS: Pakistan and Afghanistan

Militants escape control of Pakistan, officials say
By Carlotta Gall and David Rhode, New York Times, January 15, 2008

Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so. [complete article]

Many Pakistanis see leader as having reigned too long
By John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, January 14, 2008

Today, despite transforming himself from military dictator to civilian president, Musharraf has overstayed his welcome, according to critics including politicians, pollsters and citizens on the street. In a poll taken two months ago, 67 percent of those surveyed said he should resign.

“When he took power, we felt that he’d take us down the right path and then go after two or three years, but now he’s been here eight years, and who can question him, who can tell him to go?” said Abdul Rauf, 40, the owner of a men’s shop in Islamabad’s upper-class Jinnah Shopping Market.

For many, Musharraf’s greatest failure has been his inability to break Pakistan’s addiction to dynastic parties and personality cults, evidenced by the 10 years of corrupt, failed governments led by Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, a pair of prime ministers whom Musharraf accused of presiding over an “era of sham democracy.” [complete article]

Allies feel strain of Afghan war
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, January 15, 2008

The U.S. plan to send an additional 3,200 Marines to troubled southern Afghanistan this spring reflects the Pentagon’s belief that if it can’t bully its recalcitrant NATO allies into sending more troops to the Afghan front, perhaps it can shame them into doing so, U.S. officials said.

But the immediate reaction to the proposed deployment from NATO partners fighting alongside U.S. forces was that it was about time the United States stepped up its own effort.

After more than six years of coalition warfare in Afghanistan, NATO is a bundle of frayed nerves and tension over nearly every aspect of the conflict, including troop levels and missions, reconstruction, anti-narcotics efforts, and even counterinsurgency strategy. Stress has grown along with casualties, domestic pressures and a sense that the war is not improving, according to a wide range of senior U.S. and NATO-member officials who agreed to discuss sensitive alliance issues on the condition of anonymity. [complete article]

US attacks UK plan to arm Afghan militias
By Jerome Starkey, The Independent, January 14, 2008

The US general in charge of training the Afghan police has criticised British-backed plans to arm local militias in an attempt to defeat the Taliban. The remarks by Maj-Gen Robert Cone, the second most senior US soldier in Afghanistan, are likely to deepen the row between London and Washington over how to counter the insurgency. [complete article]

Westerners face new threat after suicide squad storms Kabul hotel
By Nick Meo, The Times, January 15, 2008

A Taleban suicide squad broke into the only luxury hotel in Kabul last night, killing at least seven people, including an American and a Norwegian journalist, and forcing hundreds more to take shelter in a basement as a firefight raged in the lobby.

The attack, by a bomber and at least three men armed with AK47s, appeared to be the first big assault against a civilian target in the Afghan capital since a Taleban resurgence began in 2005. Witnesses described scenes of carnage inside the hotel, as American special forces entered the building in pursuit of the attackers. [complete article]

NEWS: Lebanon

Beirut bomb hits U.S. embassy car
By Tom Perry, Reuters, January 15, 2008

A car bomb damaged a U.S. diplomatic car in Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least three people and wounding 16, and the U.S. State Department said no Americans died in the blast.

The bomb sent a column of smoke into the sky, tore masonry from buildings and destroyed at least six cars in a Christian suburb north of Beirut, as well as damaging the armored four-wheel-drive embassy car. [complete article]

Prez pick postponed again in Lebanon
By Raed Rafei and Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2008

To the surprise of no one, Lebanon’s political mess continues on and on. Parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri on Friday afternoon delayed Saturday’s session for choosing of a president until Jan. 21. It’s the 12th time the session has been postponed.

A jumble of foreign diplomats have tried and utterly failed to resolve a crisis that has left the country without a president for nearly two months. The latest would-be hero: the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa. He’s held tens of meetings with feuding political parties, in Beirut and around.

His three-point plan: elect army chief General Michel Suleiman as a compromise president; form a national unity government with no one wielding veto power; start writing up some new election laws so there’s no repeat of the current stalemate. [complete article]

NEWS ROUNDUP: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, Syria

Bush prods Saudi Arabia on high oil prices
By Stephen Lee Myers, New York Times, January 16, 2008

President Bush urged the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries on Tuesday to take into account the toll that high oil prices are having on the American economy, gingerly touching on an issue that has begun to color the last year of his presidency and dominate the presidential election campaign. [complete article]

U.S. offers Saudis ‘smart’ arms technology
By James Gerstenzang, Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2008

The most controversial element of the sales is the offer to the Saudis of Joint Direct Attack Munitions, technology that allows standard weapons to be converted into precision-guided bombs. The deal envisions the transfer to Saudi forces of 900 upgrade kits worth about $120 million. [complete article]

Minister sees need for U.S. help in Iraq until 2018
By Thom Shanker, New York Times, January 15, 2008

The Iraqi defense minister said Monday that his nation would not be able to take full responsibility for its internal security until 2012, nor be able on its own to defend Iraq’s borders from external threat until at least 2018. [complete article]

U.S. shifts Sunni strategy in Iraq
By Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times, January 14, 2008

More than 70,000 members of mostly Sunni Arab groups now work for American forces in neighborhood security programs. Transferring them to the control of the Shiite Muslim-dominated government, as policemen and members of public works crews, has taken on a new urgency as American troops begin to withdraw, officials indicated in recent interviews, meetings and briefings. [complete article]

Ex-Baathists get a break. Or do they?
By Solomon Moore, New York Times, January 14, 2008

A day after the Iraqi Parliament passed legislation billed as the first significant political step forward in Iraq after months of deadlock, there were troubling questions — and troubling silences — about the measure’s actual effects. [complete article]

Bush trip revives Israeli push for pardon of spy
By Jonathan Finer, Washington Post, January 15, 2008

A balding, bearded visage loomed over President Bush’s visit here last week, peering down from banners and from posters on buses barreling along quiet streets. The face was that of Jonathan Pollard, an American who pleaded guilty in 1986 to passing top-secret information to Israel. [complete article]

Israeli pianist Daniel Barenboim takes Palestinian citizenship
Haaretz, January 14, 2008

Daniel Barenboim, the world renowned Israeli pianist and conductor, has taken Palestinian citizenship and said he believed his rare new status could serve a model for peace between the two peoples. [complete article]

Olmert faces right-wing rebellion
By Donald Macintyre, The Independent, January 15, 2008

With Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the most right-wing party in Mr Olmert’s government already threatening to walk out, Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the opposition Likud, urged both him and the religious party Shas to do so “to stop this process”. [complete article]

Haaretz probe: Shin Bet count of Gaza civilian deaths is too low
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz, January 14, 2008

Israeli security forces killed 810 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and 2007, Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin reported Sunday at the weekly cabinet briefing in Jerusalem. He estimated that some 200 of those killed were not clearly linked to terrorist organizations. [complete article]

Syria rebuilds on site destroyed by Israeli bombs
By William J. Broad, New York Times, January 12, 2008

The puzzling site in Syria that Israeli jets bombed in September grew more curious on Friday with the release of a satellite photograph showing new construction there that [vaguely] resembles the site’s former main building. [complete article]

FEATURE: Can Mike McConnell fix America’s intelligence community?

The spymaster [PDF]
By Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, January 21, 2008

I asked how he [Mike McConnell, the US Director of National Intelligence,] defined torture.

“There’s a history of people making claims that it’s not torture if you don’t force the failure of a major organ,” McConnell said, referring to the infamous 2002 memo by John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer, who argued that an interrogation technique was torture only when it was as painful as organ failure or death. “My view is, that’s kind of absurd. It’s pretty simple. Is it excruciatingly painful to the point of forcing someone to say something because of the pain?” McConnell leaned forward confidentially. “Now, how descriptive do I want to be with you? I don’t want to tell you everything, and why is that? Look, these guys talk because, among other things, they’re scared.”

McConnell asserted that it was not difficult to evaluate the truthfulness of a confession, even a coerced one. “And as soon as they start to talk we can tell in minutes if they are lying,” he said. “One, you know a lot. And you know when someone is giving you information that is not connecting up to what you know. You also know when to use a polygraph.”

McConnell refused to specify what new methods had been approved for the C.I.A. “There are techniques to get the information, and when they get the information it has saved lives,” he said vaguely. “We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened.”

Couldn’t the information be obtained through other means?

“No,” McConnell said. “You can say that absolutely.” He again cited the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “He would not have talked to us in a hundred years. Tough guy. Absolutely committed. He had this mental image of himself as a warrior and a martyr. No way he would talk to us.” Among the things that Mohammed confessed to was the murder of Daniel Pearl. And yet few people involved in the investigation of Pearl’s death believe that Mohammed had anything to do with the crime; another man, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was convicted of killing Pearl. I mentioned McConnell’s hero, General Powell, whose disastrous speech to the United Nations, in February, 2003, made the case to the world for invading Iraq—a case founded on faulty intelligence. Part of Powell’s presentation was based on the testimony of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda operative who was captured by Pakistani forces in December, 2001. The Pakistanis turned him over to the Americans. According to Jack Cloonan, a former F.B.I. agent involved in the interrogation, Libi was providing useful and accurate intelligence until the C.I.A. took custody of him and placed him inside a plywood box for transport. He was reportedly sent to Egypt and tortured. (An agency spokesman said, “The C.I.A. does not transport individuals anywhere to be tortured.”) Libi allegedly told his interrogators that the Iraqi military had trained two Al Qaeda associates in chemical and biological warfare. This was the essence of Colin Powell’s claim: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was working with Al Qaeda. Neither assertion was true. How could we ever trust information obtained under torture when such methods had already led us into a catastrophic war?

“Now, wait a minute,” McConnell said. “You allege torture. I don’t know. Maybe it was. I don’t know.” He wasn’t in office at the time.

I asked what personal experiences informed his views.

McConnell recalled that before going to Vietnam he had participated in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program. “You had to go through jungle training, get slapped around, knocked down, put in a box, physically abused,” he said. “That’s to prepare you for what the enemy might do to you.” McConnell was thrown into a covered pit with a snake. There was no room to stand or move around. “They would open up the thing and whack you a few times and close it down,” he said. “They beat us up reasonably well.” However, he knew that he was not going to die.

Waterboarding was not a part of the training when McConnell went through SERE, although it sometimes has been. “You know what waterboarding is?” he asked. “You lay somebody on this table, or put them in an inclined position, and put a washcloth over their face, and you just drip water right here”—he pointed to his nostrils. “Try it! What happens is, water will go up your nose. And so you will get the sensation of potentially drowning. That’s all waterboarding is.”

I asked if he considered that torture.

McConnell refused to answer directly, but he said, “My own definition of torture is something that would cause excruciating pain.”

Did waterboarding fit that description?

Referring to his teen-age days as a lifeguard, he said, “I know one thing. I’m a water-safety instructor, but I cannot swim without covering my nose. I don’t know if it’s some deviated septum or mucus membrane, but water just rushes in.” For him, he said, “waterboarding would be excruciating. If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”

I queried McConnell again, later, about his views on waterboarding, since this exchange seemed to suggest that he personally condemned it. He rejected that interpretation. “You can do waterboarding lots of different ways,” he said. “I assume you can get to the point that a person is actually drowning.” That would certainly be torture, he said. The definition didn’t seem very different from John Yoo’s. The reason that he couldn’t be more specific, McConnell said, is that “if it ever is determined to be torture, there will be a huge penalty to be paid for anyone engaging in it.” [complete article – PDF]

EDITORIAL: It’s not the end of times – just the end of Bush

It’s too late, baby
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 14, 2008

Yesterday, in an address to government and business leaders in Abu Dhabi, President Bush said, “Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. So the United States is strengthening our longstanding security commitments with our friends in the Gulf — and rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late.”

Bush may take comfort in the knowledge that, according to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s spokesman Mark Regev and as the Jerusalem Post reports, “Israel and the US are ‘on the same page‘ regarding the gravity of the Iranian nuclear threat and their commitment to thwart it.” Even so, when Bush says “before its too late” to his Arab friends, most of them are probably taking comfort in completing that line with, “before its too late… for Bush to do anything about it.” He frets about only twelve months left on the clock — the rest of the world can’t wait for his term to end.

Witness the spectacle of an international “incident” that after a few days has devolved into a debate about a Filipino Monkey. The only comfort the White House can take from this drama is that the press never even noticed when the stage upon which it was set, came into question.

Iranian speedboats threatened US warships in international waters in the Straits of Hormuz. So far only one analyst — Kaveh L Afrasiabi, writing in Asia Times — has pointed out the most basic factual error in this account: there are no international waters in the Straits of Hormuz.

Let’s repeat that: there are no international waters in the Straits of Hormuz. The U.S. ships were in Iranian territorial waters exercising the “right of transit passage” afforded to them in international law by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which the United States has signed but which Congress has yet to ratify. This is why in the video of the incident, a U.S. naval officer can be heard saying, “I am engaged in transit passage in accordance with international law.”

However provocatively the Iranian speedboats might have been behaving, if from the outset, this incident had been reported as occurring inside Iranian territorial waters, the Pentagon’s first task would have been to educate the press and the public about some of the technicalities of international law as it applies to the Straits of Hormuz. That lesson would have sucked the air out of the story and Bush would have landed in Tel Aviv deprived of what he was clearly eager to employ in his latest round of fear-mongering rhetoric. Absent this rallying cry, there might have been a tiny possibility that he pay a bit of attention to the real concerns that resonate across the region.

OPINION: It’s not about Iran

It’s not about Iran
By Shibley Telhami, Washington Post, January 14, 2008

As President Bush travels through the Middle East, the prevailing assumption is that Arab states are primarily focused on the rising Iranian threat and that their attendance at the Annapolis conference with Israel in November was motivated by this threat. This assumption, reflected in the president’s speech in the United Arab Emirates yesterday, could be a costly mistake.

Israel and the Bush administration place great emphasis on confronting Iran’s nuclear potential and are prepared to engage in a peace process partly to build an anti-Iran coalition. Arabs see it differently. They use the Iran issue to lure Israel and the United States into serious Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, having concluded that the perceived Iranian threats sell better in Washington and Tel Aviv than the pursuit of peace itself.

Many Arab governments are of course concerned about Iran and its role in Iraq, but not for the same reasons as Israel and the United States. Israel sees Iran’s nuclear potential as a direct threat to its security, and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas as a military challenge.

Arab governments are less worried about the military power of Hamas and Hezbollah than they are about support for them among their publics. They are less worried about a military confrontation with Iran than about Iran’s growing influence in the Arab world. In other words, what Arab governments truly fear is militancy and the public support for it that undermines their own popularity and stability.

In all this, they see Iran as a detrimental force but not as the primary cause of militant sentiment. Most Arab governments believe instead that the militancy is driven primarily by the absence of Arab-Israeli peace.

This argument has been a loser in Washington, rejected by many and not taken seriously by others. The issue of Iran gets more traction inside the Beltway. [complete article]

NEWS: Bush promotes hypocrisy

“Nobody believes anymore what Mr. Bush is saying”
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, January 14, 2008

Shortly before President Bush showed up in the region last week, human rights activist Abduljalil Alsingace tried to deliver a petition to the U.S. Embassy complaining about the lack of democracy in his native Bahrain. He thought he might have some hope, given the strong language coming from the White House on the need for political reform in the Middle East.

But as he tells it, the U.S. Embassy was cool to his plans to deliver a petition, accepting his document only grudgingly after several days of negotiations. Then he was astounded to hear Bush’s description of Bahrain as an example of positive democratic reform. “All the wealth and power are with the royal family,” Alsingace said in an interview.

Adam Ereli, the U.S. ambassador in Bahrain, disputed Alsingace’s account, saying the embassy was happy to accept the petition and sees its job as listening to “all sides of the political spectrum.”

Still, the episode underscores the sharp disappointment with Bush among democracy advocates and dissidents in the region, who were buoyed by Bush’s clarion call in 2005 for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. They say the White House has backtracked because of a need to cultivate an alliance against Iran with the region’s autocratic leaders and, perhaps, because elections in the Palestinian territories did not go the way it had wanted. [complete article]

Bush talks the talk on free speech. Now he must walk the walk
By Claire Soares, The Independent, January 14, 2008

President George Bush is under pressure from human rights groups to use his visit to Saudi Arabia today to seek the release of the pioneering blogger Fouad al-Farhan, who has been jailed without charge for more than a month.

The human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists, are urging the president to raise Mr Farhan’s case with King Abdullah today. They also want him to appeal for the release of an Egyptian blogger, Abdel Karim Suleiman, the first to be jailed in Egypt, when he meets President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm-el-She-ikh on Wednesday. The Egyptian blogger is serving a four-year sentence for insulting President Mubarak. [complete article]

ANALYSIS: Bush will hand his successor a fait accompli on Iraq

Bush shakes up ’08 Iraq debate
By Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, January 12, 2008

Camp Arifjan in the desert kingdom of Kuwait, America’s depot to the Iraq war, feels about as far away as you can get from South Carolina, Super Tuesday and the election-year squabbles back home. And George W. Bush, who is currently midway through his six-nation tour of the Mideast, is doing a good job of distancing himself from the politics of 2008. But as Bush rallied U.S. troops at the base here on Saturday with a “Hoo-ah” and conferred with his Iraq dream team, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, he indicated that he was setting in motion policies that could dramatically affect the presidential race–and any decisions the next president makes in 2009.

In remarks to the traveling press, delivered from the Third Army operation command center here, Bush said that negotiations were about to begin on a long-term strategic partnership with the Iraqi government modeled on the accords the United States has with Kuwait and many other countries. Crocker, who flew in from Baghdad with Petraeus to meet with the president, elaborated: “We’re putting our team together now, making preparations in Washington,” he told reporters. “The Iraqis are doing the same. And in the few weeks ahead, we would expect to get together to start this negotiating process.” The target date for concluding the agreement is July, says Gen. Doug Lute, Bush’s Iraq coordinator in the White House–in other words, just in time for the Democratic and Republican national conventions. [complete article]

Vanishing act
By Noah Feldman, New York Times, January 13, 2008

What if the United States were at war during a presidential election — and none of the candidates wanted to talk about it? Iraq has become the great disappearing issue of the early primary season, and if nothing fundamental changes on the ground there — a probable result of current policy — the war may disappear even more completely in the new year.

The reasons for Iraq’s political eclipse begin with the unfortunate fact that candidates strive to create feel-good associations, and the war is a certain downer. The film studios could barely get a Middle East movie to break even in the past 12 months (“In the Valley of Elah,” anyone?), and the political image makers have apparently taken note. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Judicial complicity in torture

U.S. Court of Appeals decides that at Guantanamo, torture’s part of the job, but not to worry, the victims aren’t people
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 13, 2008

Suppose a United States Court of Appeals decided that even if torture is illegal, torturers cannot be prosecuted because “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” And suppose the same court when approached by plaintiffs who have alleged that “high-level U.S. government officials treated them as less than human,” told those plaintiffs that the court itself did not regard them as “persons.” Would such a legal ruling merit great attention in the Washington Post or the New York Times? Apparently not.

What the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit decided last Friday, was that, as James Oliphant reported in the Baltimore Sun, “even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any constitutional rights.”

As Eric Lewis, a lawyer for the detainees said, “It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when a court finds that torture is all in a days’ work for the secretary of defense and senior generals.” It is also an awful day when the leading newspapers in America regard this event as worthy of nothing more than a cursory mention.

What the federal court of appeals has in effect done is to undergird a culture of torture. They have concocted a legal defense for individuals who might want to shield themselves behind a line of defense that failed the Nazis: we were just following orders. And they have constructed a legalistic artifice that dovetails into the mindset that facilitates torture: the de-humanization of the victims.

FEATURE: Fighting over there, then killing back here

Across America, deadly echoes of foreign battles
By Deborah Sontage and Lizette Alvarez, New York Times, January 13, 2008

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction. [complete article]

NEWS & ANALYSIS: The Iranian threat

Saudi cannot be launchpad for Iran attack: report
AFP, January 12, 2008

A leading Saudi newspaper on Saturday ruled out any attempt by the United States to use the oil-rich Gulf kingdom as a launchpad for a possible war on Iran over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme.

Two days before a visit to Saudi Arabia by US President George W. Bush, the pro-government daily Al-Riyadh said: “We refuse to be used to launch wars or tensions with Iran. [complete article]

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in secret Iraq talks with US
By Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, January 13, 2008

The head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps slipped into the green zone of Baghdad last month to press Tehran’s hardline position over the terms of the current talks with American officials, it was claimed last week.

Iraqi government sources say that Major-General Mohammed Ali Jafari, 50, travelled secretly from Tehran. Jafari appears to have passed through checkpoints on his way into the fortified enclave that contains the American embassy and Iraqi ministries, even though he is on Washington’s “most wanted” list. [complete article]

Iran encounter grimly echoes ’02 war game
By Thom Shanker, New York Times, January 12, 2008

There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.

In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002. In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats. [complete article]

Iran urges agency to settle atomic case
Reuters, January , 2008

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the visiting chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Saturday that Iran’s nuclear case should be handled by the I.A.E.A. and not the United Nations Security Council, which has imposed two rounds of sanctions on Tehran. [complete article]

Israel stressed to Bush that Iran is a nuclear ‘threat’: general
AFP, January 12, 2008

Iran poses a real nuclear threat and Israel made that point clear to US President George W. Bush during his visit this week, an Israeli defence official said Saturday. [complete article]

NEWS & OPINION: More mystery around Bhutto assasssination; Army in retreat; clampdown on the press

Mysterious crowd suddenly stopped Bhutto’s car, officer says
By Saeed Shah and Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, January 11, 2008

Two new reports on the assassination last month of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto suggest that the killing may have been an ambitious plot rather than an isolated act of violence and that the government of President Pervez Musharraf knows far more than it’s admitted about the murder.

A police officer who witnessed the assassination said that a mysterious crowd stopped Bhutto’s car that day, moving her to emerge through the sunroof. And a document has surfaced in the Pakistani news media that contradicts the government’s version of her death and contains details on the pistol and the suicide bomb used in the murder.

The witness was Ishtiaq Hussain Shah of the Rawalpindi police. As Bhutto’s car headed onto Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Road after an election rally Dec. 27, a crowd appeared from nowhere and stopped the motorcade, shouting slogans of her Pakistan Peoples Party and waving party banners, according to his account. [complete article]

Angry Pakistanis turn against army
By Christina Lamb, The Sunday Times, January 13, 2008

It is the most expensive – and talked about – property development in Pakistan, but few can get near it. Hidden behind barbed wire, the new state-of-the-art army headquarter to replace a garrison in Rawalpindi is costing a reputed £1 billion and will cover 2,400 acres of prime land in Islamabad, including lakes, a residential complex, schools and clinics.

Originally intended to represent the best of Pakistan, the new army HQ is now being seen as a symbol of all that is wrong with the country.

Amid nationwide anger over the killing of the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and a widespread belief that the country’s military or intelligence may have been involved, the population is turning against the army for the first time. [complete article]

U.S. journalist is ordered to leave Pakistan
By John Ward Anderson, Washington Post, January , 2008

An American freelance journalist and scholar based in Pakistan was ordered to leave the country this week after writing an article that might have been deemed unflattering to the Pakistani government, according to friends, colleagues and a U.S.-based media rights group.

Nicholas Schmidle, a frequent contributor to Slate magazine and a fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs in Washington, was served with a deportation notice at his Islamabad home Tuesday night and left Pakistan on Friday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement. [complete article]

American journalist Nicholas Schmidle deported from Pakistan
By Steve Clemmons, Huffington Post, January 11, 2008

Other journalists I have spoken to today tell me that there is a pattern of intimidation of journalists clearly emerging in Pakistan. While this may be the first deportation of an American journalist that most can recall, there have been other troubling incidents.

New America Foundation fellow and journalist Eliza Griswold was apparently held in custody by Pakistan authorities on one occasion. CNN Terrorism Analyst and New America Foundation senior fellow Peter Bergen was denied a visa on one occasion in 2006 with no explanation given. Nir Rosen — also a New America Foundation fellow who has reported extensively on Middle East affairs — was threatened in Quetta, Pakistan by what some believe to be government “goons” and was told that he needed to leave immediately or he would be “the next Danny Pearl.” New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall was beaten by thugs who identified themselves as Pakistani police.

Some believe that Schmidle’s article antogonized Pakistani government officials because he conducted interviews in Quetta where the Taliban are operating in full public. These sources suggest that Pakistan government authorities want to limit exposure to the fact that they have done nothing to shut down the Taliban in Quetta and/or are turning a blind eye to the Taliban’s operations theres. [complete article]

NEWS & OPINION: Re-Baathification; Basra’s ‘misery gangs’ murdering women

Iraq eases curb for former officials of Hussein’s party
By Richard A Oppel Jr. and Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, January 13, 2008

The Iraqi Parliament passed a bill on Saturday that would allow some former officials from Saddam Hussein’s party to fill government positions but would impose a strict ban on others. The legislation is the first of the major so-called political benchmark measures to pass after months of American pressure for progress.

The measure, which is expected to be approved as a law by the presidential council, was described by its backers as opening the door for the reinstatement of thousands of low-level Baath Party members barred from office after the 2003 invasion. Since then, the Bush administration has urged the Iraqi government to reintegrate many officials in order to help mend the deep rifts between Sunni Arabs who used to control the government under Mr. Hussein and the Shiites who now dominate politics here.

However, it was unclear on Saturday how far the legislation would go toward soothing Sunni Arabs, because serious disagreements emerged in the hours after the vote about how much the law would actually do.

While the measure would reinstate many former Baathists, some political leaders said it would also force thousands of other former party members out of current government jobs and into retirement — especially in the security forces, where American military officials have worked hard to increase the role of Sunnis. One member of Iraq’s current de-Baathification committee said the law could even push 7,000 active Interior Ministry employees into retirement. [complete article]

Who is killing the women of Basra?
By Yifat Susskind, ZNet, January 10, 2008

In Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, 2008 was ushered in with an announcement of the 2007 death toll of women targeted by Islamist militias. City officials reported on December 31 that 133 women were killed and mutilated last year, their bodies dumped in trash bins with notes warning others against “violating Islamic teachings…” But ambulance drivers who are hired to troll the city streets in the early mornings to collect the bodies confirm what most residents believe: the actual numbers are much higher.

The killers’ leaflets are not very original. They usually accuse the women of being prostitutes or adulterers. But those murdered are more likely to be doctors, professors, or journalists. We know this because activists from the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) have taken on the gruesome task of visiting city morgues to try and determine the scale and pattern of the killings. According to OWFI, most of the women who have been murdered “are PhD holders, professionals, activists, and office workers.”

Their crime is not “promiscuity,” but rather opposition to the transformation of Iraq into an Islamist state. That bloody transition has been the main political trend under US occupation. It’s no secret who is killing the women of Basra. Shiite political forces empowered by the US invasion have been terrorizing women there since 2003. Within weeks of the invasion, these groups established “Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” squads, which many Iraqis refer to simply as “misery gangs.” They began by patrolling the streets, harassing and sometimes beating women who did not dress or behave to their liking. Coalition forces did nothing to stop them, and soon the militias escalated their violence to torturing and assassinating anyone who they saw as an obstacle to turning Iraq into an Islamist state. [complete article]

OPINION: Foreign policy after Bush

Cornered in square one
By Steven Weber and Bruce W. Jentleson, Los Angeles Times, January 13, 2008

… the next president will not be starting from an international position similar to the one Bush inherited no matter how successful the administration is in undoing the damage of its failed policies. A once internationally weak and democratizing Russia has become an autocratic and provocative petro-state. China’s economy is more than twice the size of what it was in 2000, and its global influence has correspondingly risen. And a new generation of jihadists, no less committed to violence, is eager to continue the anti-America campaign.

The GOP candidates who would build on Bush’s old approach to foreign policy clearly don’t get how the world has changed. But neither do Democrats who stress reversing what Bush has done. No one should feel vindicated by the Bush administration’s reversals, because defining the future of U.S. foreign policy in terms of the past would be as big a mistake for the next president as it was for Bush.

When you are a great power, a lost decade does not simply leave you back where you started. It leaves you far behind. Our presidential candidates had better plan to do more than simply reboot the system and start over, as though the clock had stopped in January 2001. [complete article]

REVIEW: They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons

Fathers and sons
By Tomothy Noah, New York Times, January 13, 2008

To be neoconservative is to bear almost daily witness to the resurrection of Adolf Hitler. “Truly Hitlerian,” the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer pronounced Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, opined that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers “misread our system as one that’s weak, that can’t take casualties. … Hitler made that mistake.” Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, said of the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last spring, “Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system.” In the same month, the defense analyst Richard Perle mused on whether it had been “a correct reading” of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat “to believe that business could be done with him that would produce a result? I don’t think so. These are the difficult decisions. Diplomacy with Hitler. Chamberlain went to Munich, presumably on the theory that you talk to your enemies and not to your friends, and what did it produce?”

Just about the only place the neoconservative movement can’t locate Hitler is Nazi Germany. As late as 1944, the founding-neocon-to-be, Irving Kristol, publicly dismissed the “near hysterical insistence upon the pressing military danger,” Jacob Heilbrunn reports in his new book, “They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.” While the Nazis herded Jews into the gas chambers, Kristol, then a 24-year-old Trotskyist, held fast to his conviction that the Allies were no different from the Axis in their imperialism. Kristol took this view because he was “indulging in an abstract crusade for a better world.” [complete article]

IDEAS: The science of the moral sense

The moral instinct
By Steven Pinker, New York Times, January 13, 2008

Two features of reality point any rational, self-preserving social agent in a moral direction. And they could provide a benchmark for determining when the judgments of our moral sense are aligned with morality itself.

One is the prevalence of nonzero-sum games. In many arenas of life, two parties are objectively better off if they both act in a nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children in danger and refrain from shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown while we file our nails or feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys. Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at your expense and you played the sucker, but the same is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally, would have to conclude that the state we should aim for is the one in which we both are unselfish. These spreadsheet projections are not quirks of brain wiring, nor are they dictated by a supernatural power; they are in the nature of things.

The other external support for morality is a feature of rationality itself: that it cannot depend on the egocentric vantage point of the reasoner. If I appeal to you to do anything that affects me — to get off my foot, or tell me the time or not run me over with your car — then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take me seriously. Unless I am Galactic Overlord, I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not, any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am standing on is a special place in the universe just because I happen to be standing on it. [complete article]

IDEAS: We think not just with our brains, but with our bodies

Don’t just stand there, think
By Drake Bennett, Boston Globe, January 13, 2008

When you read something confusing, or work a crossword puzzle, or try to remember where you put your keys, what do you do with your body? Do you sit? Do you stand? Do you pace? Do you do anything with your hands? Do you move your eyes in a particular pattern?

How you answer questions like these, it turns out, may determine how long it will take for you to decipher what you’re reading, solve your puzzle, or get your keys back.

The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on – that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A series of studies, the latest published in November, has shown that children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking. Another recent study suggested that stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving. And in one study published last year, subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is “embodied cognition,” and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding – and enhancing – the abilities of the human mind. [complete article]

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The unraveling of Israel’s nuclear ambiguity

CIA reveals: We said in 1974 that Israel had nuclear weapons
By Amir Oren, Haaretz, January 11, 2008

The Central Intelligence Agency, backed by bodies including the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Defense Intelligence Agency, determined in August 1974 that Israel had nuclear “weapons in being,” a “small number” of which it “produced and stockpiled.”

Israel was also suspected of providing nuclear materials, equipment or technology to Iran, South Africa and other then-friendly countries.

This top secret document, consigned to the CIA’s vaults for almost 32 years, was suddenly released to the public this week, during U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to Israel and on the eve of his trip to the Persian Gulf. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — For several decades, Israel has adopted a position of so-called “nuclear ambiguity,” asserting that it would not be the first state to introduce atomic weapons to the Middle East. The United States has colluded in allowing this claim to rest unchallenged — even though it is widely understood that Israel does in fact possess a nuclear arsenal estimated to range from 70 to 400 warheads.

The first indications that the United States’ position might change occurred during Robert Gates’ confirmation hearings in which he included Israel among the nuclear states that surround Iran. Documents released by the Nixon Library a few weeks ago confirm that in 1969, Henry Kissinger warned President Nixon about Israel’s nuclear capabilities and that the “Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons.” A year ago, Ehud Olmert provoked a storm of criticism inside Israel by being the first Israeli prime minister to make reference to Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

It seems to be a matter of time (months or even weeks?) before Israel decides to unambiguously come out of the nuclear closet. If this happens, the nuclear equation changes across the whole region. Will it trigger a Middle East nuclear arms race? Will it help empower those who argue that the only effective way of challenging Iran’s nuclear program is through turning the whole region into a nuclear-weapon-free zone? Or will the United States attempt to contrive a policy that claims that Israel has a unique “right” to possess nuclear weapons and exempt itself from international treaties?