Category Archives: Editor’s comments

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Another defeat in the war on Islam

U.S. prosecution of Muslim group ends in mistrial
By Leslie Eaton, New York Times, October 23, 2007

A federal judge declared a mistrial on Monday in what was widely seen as the government’s flagship terrorism-financing case after prosecutors failed to persuade a jury to convict five leaders of a Muslim charity on any charges, or even to reach a verdict on many of the 197 counts.

The case, involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its backers, is the government’s largest and most complex legal effort to shut down what it contends is American financing for terrorist organizations in the Middle East.

President Bush announced he was freezing the charity’s assets in December 2001, saying that the radical Islamic group Hamas had “obtained much of the money it pays for murder abroad right here in the United States.”

But at the trial, the government did not accuse the foundation, which was based in a Dallas suburb, of paying directly for suicide bombings. Instead, the prosecution said, the foundation supported terrorism by sending more than $12 million to charitable groups, known as zakat committees, which build hospitals and feed the poor. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — This is a vindication for the principle that democracy depends on the separation of powers. Those in the executive branch of government who obviously feel more comfortable with a totalitarian concentration of power will however be disappointed that most of the jury reached the “wrong” verdict and that in doing so they may have been influenced by a former American consul general in Jerusalem. That the defendents would regard this as having been “an Israeli trial tried on American soil,” is not surprising, yet when a jury member says of the trial, “it seems political to me,” noting that the prosecution’s key witness was paid by the Israeli government to testify, it seems reasonable to ask, who is our government working for? And when what had been the largest Muslim charity in the United States gets put on trial there seems little reason to wonder why so many Muslims, and others, see the war on terrorism as a war on Islam.

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NEWS: The damning photos we don’t get to see

The case for Israel’s strike on Syria
By Martha Raddatz, ABC News, October 19, 2007

…as ABC News reported in July, the Israelis made the decision to take the facility out themselves, though the U.S. urged them not to. The Bush administration, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates leading the way, said the Israelis and the U.S. should “confront not attack.”

The official said the facility had been there at least eight months before the strike, but because of the lack of fissionable material, the United States hesitated on the attack because it couldn’t be absolutely proved that it was a nuclear site.

But the official told ABC News, “It was unmistakable what it was going to be. There is no doubt in my mind.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Hmmm… “A senior U.S. official” has no doubt in his mind — sounds like Cheney or someone who spends too much time in his company. And of course there’s no reason why we would need to see the compelling photographic evidence when we can see such excellent computer graphics.

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OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The phoenix of preventive war arises from Syrian ashes

Preemption, Israeli style
By Joshua Muravchik, Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2007

Last month, one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of the Arab-Israel conflict began to leak slowly into the news. Although the facts are still unconfirmed, what seems to have happened has major implications not only for the region but even more for the laws of war and preemption that President Bush has been trying to redefine ever since his 2002 national security strategy paper.

First, Syrian spokesmen complained that Israeli planes had violated their country’s airspace on Sept. 6 — and had been driven off, or so they said. Within a few days came stories — mostly from anonymous sources — that the planes had fired into Syria; these were followed by still other stories that a target had in fact been hit. But what was it?

After further journalistic digging, the most plausible accounts said that the Syrian targets were related to nuclear weapons activity and may even have been manned by North Koreans. Later reports suggest some dispute within the U.S. government about how far Syria had progressed in achieving its nuclear ambitions, but these same reports confirm that this is what Israel was targeting.

The obscurity of this episode results in part from uncharacteristically tight lips in Jerusalem and Damascus. But that is not the whole of the reason. There has also been a deafening silence from the international community and especially from the other states of the region. This highly unusual reaction is one of the oddest parts of the whole episode and, in some ways, the most meaningful. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The neoconservatives and their Iraqi allies famously predicted that American soldiers would be greeted in Baghdad with sweets and flowers. As if to outdo themselves in making wild predictions, with Iran now the target, the suggestion being floated by Joshua Muravchik and other neocons is that alarming predictions about the consequences of a US/Israeli attack on Iran are being vastly overstated. The lesson from Syria, so we are supposed to believe, is that a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities will be greeted by deafening silence.

Eager to boost her stock in the Israel lobby and implying to neocons that there is such a thing as life-after-Cheney, Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in expressing her support for the Israeli attack:

“We don’t have as much information as we wish we did. But what we think we know is that with North Korean help, both financial and technical and material, the Syrians apparently were putting together, and perhaps over some period of years, a nuclear facility, and the Israelis took it out. I strongly support that.”

Clinton’s Iran vote: the fallout
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, October 14, 2007

Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted against it. Senator Barack Obama said he would have voted against it if he had voted. Former Senator John Edwards implied he would have voted against it if he could vote.

And Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton? She voted in favor of the measure in question, which asked the Bush administration to declare Iran’s 125,000-member Revolutionary Guard Corps a foreign terrorist organization. Such a move — more hawkish than even most of the Bush administration has been willing to venture so far — would intensify America’s continuing confrontation with Iran, many foreign policy experts say.
[…]
Think of it as Iran declaring that the United States military is a terrorist organization because it carries out President Bush’s orders. Such a move, say some Iran experts — including some advisers to the Clinton campaign who declined to publicly criticize their possible boss — runs the risk of further alienating the Iranian population, because many Iranians are tied to the Revolutionary Guard or its many offshoots and enterprises in some way.

“What Senator Clinton and the other legislators who voted for this bill don’t seem to realize is that the Revolutionary Guards are not Al Qaeda,” said Karim Sadjapour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They’re not a group of voluntary jihadists signing up to fight the United States. Many are conscripts taken from the regular army.” [complete article]

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OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: America’s shadow

The ‘good Germans’ among us
By Frank Rich, New York Times, October 14, 2007

We can continue to blame the Bush administration for the horrors of Iraq — and should. Paul Bremer, our post-invasion viceroy and the recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts, issued the order that allows contractors to elude Iraqi law, a folly second only to his disbanding of the Iraqi Army. But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press — the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration’s case — failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin. [complete article]

See also,

Editor’s Comment — As Frank Rich notes:

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Yet what is missing in these observations about the multiple ways in which our humanity has been compromised, is an acknowledgment of the degree to which the administration’s policies have been buttressed by a current in American politics and across American culture that provided the bedrock for America’s response to 9/11, namely, xenophobia. This isn’t xenophobia that was triggered by 9/11; it was an already prevailing sentiment that the Bush administration could easily harness in support of its policies.

When GOP presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, recently said, “we ought to double Guantanamo,” he wasn’t sticking his neck out; he knew he was appealing not only to his base but to also to those xenophobic Democrats who fear that a liberal in the White House might make America more vulnerable to the foreign threat.

And when last year the controversy blew up over the outsourcing of US port management to Dubai’s DP World, Democrats in Congress didn’t hesitate to jump on the xenophobic bandwagon.

And after four Blackwater mercenaries were brutally killed in Fallujah in 2004, the Pentagon knew that domestically there would be little significant political fallout from the ensuing Battle of Fallujah in which an estimated 600 Iraqi civilians died. Just as in Mogadishu, when American lives had been lost, any notion of proportionality went out of the window.

And now that in the millions, Iraqis have had to flee their war-torn country, Congress seems more concerned about the Armenian genocide than about America’s responsibility for accepting refugees. While Sweden — a country that has had no role in the war — has accepted Iraqis in numbers which would be the equivalent of the U.S. taking in about 500,000 refugees, politicians in America know that pushing for a similar response here would involve unacceptable political risks. In May, in a token humanitarian gesture, the House of Representatives proposed a four-year plan to accept up to 60,000 Iraqis who worked for at least a year with U.S.- or U.N.-affiliated groups. This reflects the way in which in much of the public debate on the refugee issue, the focus has been narrowed to one of employer-employee obligations.

When it comes to Iraqi refugees, the same America that thought it could have a free war, would rather turn away from its responsibilities than open its doors.

No need for a warrant, you’re an immigrant
By Julia Preston, New York Times, October 14, 2007

Long Island officials protested when federal agents searching for immigrant gang members raided local homes two weeks ago. The agents had rousted American citizens and legal immigrants from their beds in the night, complained Lawrence W. Mulvey, the Nassau County police commissioner, and arrested suspected illegal immigrants without so much as a warrant.

“We don’t need warrants to make the arrests,” responded Peter J. Smith, the special agent in charge in New York for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency that conducted the raids.

His concise answer helps explain the friction that the Bush administration’s recent campaign of immigration enforcement has caused. Last week, immigration officials announced that they had made more than 1,300 arrests across the country over the summer when they went looking for gang members. Since the raids were carried out under immigration law, many protections in place under the American criminal codes did not apply. Foreign residents of the United States, whether here legally or not, answer to a different set of rules.

Immigration agents are not required to obtain warrants to detain suspects. The agents also have broad authority to question people about their immigration status and to search them and their homes. There are no Miranda rights that agents must read when making arrests. Detained immigrants have the right to a lawyer, but only one they can pay for. [complete article]

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: “Nuclear project” – story still under construction

Analysts find Israel struck a nuclear project inside Syria
By David E. Sanger and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, October 14, 2007

Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state. The Bush administration was divided at the time about the wisdom of Israel’s strike, American officials said, and some senior policy makers still regard the attack as premature.
[…]
The officials did not say that the administration had ultimately opposed the Israeli strike, but that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates were particularly concerned about the ramifications of a pre-emptive strike in the absence of an urgent threat.

“There wasn’t a lot of debate about the evidence,” said one American official familiar with the intense discussions over the summer between Washington and the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. “There was a lot of debate about how to respond to it.”
[…]
The partly constructed Syrian reactor was detected earlier this year by satellite photographs, according to American officials. They suggested that the facility had been brought to American attention by the Israelis, but would not discuss why American spy agencies seemed to have missed the early phases of construction.

North Korea has long provided assistance to Syria on a ballistic missile program, but any assistance toward the construction of the reactor would have been the first clear evidence of ties between the two countries on a nuclear program. North Korea has successfully used its five-megawatt reactor at the Yongbyon nuclear complex to reprocess nuclear fuel into bomb-grade material, a model that some American and Israeli officials believe Syria may have been trying to replicate.
[…]
While Bush administration officials have made clear in recent weeks that the target of the Israeli raid was linked to North Korea in some way, Mr. Bush has not repeated his warning since the attack. In fact, the administration has said very little about the country’s suspected role in the Syria case, apparently for fear of upending negotiations now under way in which North Korea has pledged to begin disabling its nuclear facilities.

While the partly constructed Syrian reactor appears to be based on North Korea’s design, the American and foreign officials would not say whether they believed the North Koreans sold or gave the plans to the Syrians, or whether the North’s own experts were there at the time of the attack. It is possible, some officials said, that the transfer of the technology occurred several years ago. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — In spite of the fact that hard evidence has yet to be produced, let’s for now take it as given that Syria was building some type of nuclear facility and that it was destroyed by an Israeli air attack. Although the Times notes, as has been repeated so often, that “information about the raid has been wrapped in extraordinary secrecy,” the question — why the secrecy? — remains all important.

Suppose Israel was reluctant to be perceived as having acted without US support and it waited until it got the green light from Washington — except, when the green light came, it came from the Vice President’s office. Now that would be one incredibly compelling reason for secrecy from all quarters! That’s something neither Cheney, nor Bush, nor Olmert could afford to reveal.

Of course I speculate, but while this story remains so murky, speculation will be rife.

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Non-violence is easy to ignore

Only now, the full horror of Burmese junta’s repression of monks emerges
By Rosalind Russell, The Independent, October 12, 2007

Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatised to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon’s residents hear their neighbours being taken away.

Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month’s pro-democracy uprising.

The first-hand accounts describe a campaign hidden from view, but even more sinister and terrifying than the open crackdown in which the regime’s soldiers turned their bullets and batons on unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Rangoon, killing at least 13. At least then, the world was watching. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Paul Wolfowitz used to say that if only the Palestinians would dedicate themselves to a non-violent struggle they would have the world’s support (or words something to that effect). Mahahatma Gandhi without doubt was the embodiment of the power of ahimsa. It is thus tragic that the lesson from Myanmar is that non-violent resistance can easily be crushed and just as easily falls away from the media’s attention. For as long as the media rewards violence with the bulk of its attention, non-violence may have infinite moral weight yet little to no political effect.

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Time for Israel to cut the crap

Syria tells journalists Israeli raid did not occur
By Hugh Naylor, New York Times, October 11, 2007

Israel has been unusually quiet about the attack on Sept. 6 and has effectively imposed a news blackout about it. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli opposition leader, on Sept. 19 became the first public figure in Israel to acknowledge that an attack had even taken place. Some Israeli officials have said, though not publicly, that the raid hit a nuclear-related facility that North Korea was helping to equip, but they have not specified where.

On Monday, journalists toured the agricultural center at the government’s invitation to prove, Mr. Mehdi said, that no nuclear weapons program or Israeli attacks occurred there. “The allegations are completely groundless, and I don’t really understand where all this W.M.D. talk came from,” Mr. Mehdi said, referring to weapons of mass destruction.

“There was no raid here — we heard nothing,” he added. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — It’s much harder to prove that something didn’t happen than that it did but Syria has shown where the bombs didn’t fall. The onus is now on Israel. Stop playing games. Release the IAF in-flight videos so that we can see the time, the coordinates, the targets, and the explosions. If no such evidence is forthcoming, then the Syrians should be believed. And in that event, the press needs to engage in some serious self-examination. Why is it still so willing to allow itself to be the delivery system for imaginary weapons of mass destruction?

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NEWS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Beware the principles of Congress

Worried Iraqi officials urge calm as Turkish-Kurdish conflict escalates
By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, October 11, 2007

Turkish armed forces’ escalation of bombing and shelling in northern Iraq, along with threats of a broad ground incursion across the border, has alarmed and surprised Iraqi officials, who say the problems Turkey faces from rebel groups can be solved peacefully through diplomacy.

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said officials in his government are preparing to get parliamentary approval for a cross-border military operation aimed at disrupting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a guerrilla group that operates on both sides of the border. [complete article]

Righteousness before realism
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, October 11, 2007

Imperial delusions die hard – and once again the US Congress is trying to legislate for the world. As most Turks see it, this week’s committee vote in the House of Representatives accusing Turkey of genocide against the Armenians in 1915-17 is an insulting, gratuitous interference in their sovereign affairs. As the 27 Democrats and Republicans who backed the bill see it, it is a matter of putting the world to rights, according to America’s lights.

Congress has a long history of extraterritorial meddling. It regularly slaps unilateral sanctions on “rogue” governments, and orders foreign businesses and individuals to obey its strictures, regardless of nationality. Its attempts to direct US foreign policy are resisted by the executive branch to varying degrees. On Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Israel, White House and legislature mostly agree. On Turkey, like Iraq, they are at noisy loggerheads.

“We oppose the bill. We think it is a bad idea that will do nothing to improve Turkish-Armenian relations. It will not do anything to advance American interests,” Daniel Fried, assistant secretary for Eurasian affairs, told Turkish television this week. President Bush, the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and defence secretary, Robert Gates, all chimed in. They even mobilised all former living US secretaries of state in joint opposition, but to no avail. It was a measure of the lame-duck president’s chronic weakness. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — It’s often said that politics is all about timing. Some members of Congress might think this is a perfect time to win a few Armenian-American votes. But really, in 2007 the United States Congress decides it’s time to recognize the Armenian genocide from 1915-17?

Turkey has just recalled its ambassador in protest, a billion dollars worth of Boeing defense contracts now hang in the balance, and while the US asks Turkey not to invade Iraq who in Ankara is now likely to listen?

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Accounting for Blackwater

Blackwater case highlights legal uncertainties
By Alissa J. Rubin and Paul von Zielbauer, New York Times, October 11, 2007

Roughly 100,000 American contractors are working in Iraq, but there has yet to be a prosecution for a single incident of violence, according to Scott Horton, a specialist in the law of armed conflict who teaches at Columbia University.

“Imagine a town of 100,000 people, and there hasn’t been a prosecution in three years,” Mr. Horton said. “How do you justify the fact that you aren’t addressing this?”

One remedy is not being discussed: the State Department can waive immunity for contractors and let the case be tried in the Iraqi courts under Order 17, which is the section of the Transitional Administrative Law approved in 2004 that gives contractors immunity.

L. Paul Bremer III, who supervised the drafting of the immunity order as administrator of the United States occupation authority, said: “The immunity is not absolute. The order requires contractors to respect all Iraqi laws, so it’s not a blanket immunity.” [complete article]

See also, State Dept. may phase out Blackwater (AP).

Editor’s Comment — While the moral, legal, and political dimensions of the Blackwater story have been given most attention, the other part to which there are merely allusions is Blackwater as an expression of American culture. Yet the fantasies being lived out by that these “GI Joe-looking guys” — “They think they’re bloody Rambo!” — are not simply products of youthful imagination. Blackwater’s Iraqi rampage has been inspired as much, if not more, by Hollywood as by 9/11 and a Pentagon addicted to outsourcing.

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ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Iran – Israel’s enemy of convenience

Iran, the inflatable bogey
By Dr. Trita Parsi, Rootless Cosmopolitan, October 9, 2007

If Iran is, as Netanyahu and his allies in the U.S. suggest, irrationally aggressive, prone to a suicidal desire for apocalyptic confrontation, then both diplomacy and deterrence and containment are ruled out as policy options for Washington. The “Mad Mullahs,” as the neocons call them, are not capable of traditional balance of power realism. In the arguments of Netanyahu and such fellow travelers as Norman Podhortez and Newt Gingrich, to imagine that war against the regime in Tehran is avoidable is to be as naïve as Chamberlain was in 1938.

treaterousalliance.jpgHowever, as I discovered in the course of researching my book Treacherous Alliance – the Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States, not only does Netanyahu’s characterization of Iran have little relationship to reality; Netanyahu himself knows this better than most. Outside of the realm of cynical posturing by politicians, most Israeli strategists recognize that Iran represents a strategic challenge to the favorable balance of power enjoyed by Israel and the U.S. in the Middle East over the past 15 years, but it is no existential threat to the Israel, the U.S. or the Arab regimes.

And that was the view embraced by the Likud leader himself during his last term as prime minister of Israel. In the course of dozens of interviews with key players in the Israeli strategic establishment, a fascinating picture emerged of Netanyahu strongly pushing back against the orthodoxy of his Labor Party predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, which treated Iran as one of Israel’s primary enemies. Not only that, he initiated an extensive discreet program of reaching out to the Islamic Republic. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Without wanting to understate Israel’s capacity for irrational behavior, it’s worth asking whether for the Israeli right there is one issue to which all others are subordinate. I would say that there is and that it is the consolidation of the territorial expansion that Israel has been engaged in for the last 40 years through building settlements in the West Bank. Even today, The Guardian reports on yet more seizure of Palestinian land that will allow a huge expansion of settlements. The greatest threat to this ongoing expansionist enterprise would come from the revival of the long-stalled peace process. The relentless construction of settlements, the construction of an apartheid road system separating Israeli and Palestinian traffic, and the construction of the so-called security barrier — these are all ways of making it clear, declarations to the contrary notwithstanding, that Israel has no intention of withdrawing to the 1967 borders.

And how does Iran fit into this equation? It presents a useful diversion through which in the shadow of a supposed existential threat, the development of the West Bank can continue all the way to the end of a window of opportunity — otherwise known as the Bush administration.

While Netanyahu’s neoconservative supporters in Washington can’t wait to see the bombs rain down on Iran, my suspicion (and it’s nothing more than that) is that Bibi will play the 1938 rhetoric for all it’s worth even while the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran doesn’t cause him to loose a wink of sleep. Indeed, a silver-lining for Israel from a nuclear Iran is that that would provide the Jewish state with the perfect opportunity to come out of its own nuclear closet. It could claim that it was remaining true to its assertion that it would not have been the first state to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the region even if it was the first to deploy them — it simply didn’t make a fanfair about the fact; there was no declaration, no introduction. And with the balance of power having shifted towards Iran, the Israel lobby in Washington would have an easy time sustaining the United States’ financial commitment to Israel’s defense into perpetuity.

Having said that, a line that’s almost as popular as Netanyahu’s “1938”, is John McCain’s, “There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option, that is a nuclear armed Iran.” The question thus remains, does the US and/or Israel truly believe that in such an attack the benefits outweigh the risks?

If Israel’s recent incursion into Syrian airspace was really as momentous an event as all the neocon chest-thumping would suggest, how come we still don’t know what happened? What might have been seen as a muscle-flexing exercise directed at Iran, at this point looks more like a very cautious dip of one toe in some icy water. While its success as a PR exercise is beyond question, its military significance remains in doubt.

And while the Iran-baiting rhetoric coming from American officials in Iraq has been escalating for months and months, it remains possible that the threshold will never be crossed from words to war. Everyone is playing an extremely dangerous game, yet the contest between those competing for the title, “master of destiny,” is a struggle between men, not one of whom has a clear view of the future.

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The longer this goes on, the less we know

An Israeli strike on Syria kindles debate in the U.S
By Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper, New York Times, October 10, 2007

It has long been known that North Korean scientists have aided Damascus in developing sophisticated ballistic missile technology, and there appears to be little debate that North Koreans frequently visited a site in the Syrian desert that Israeli jets attacked Sept. 6. Where officials disagree is whether the accumulated evidence points to a Syrian nuclear program that poses a significant threat to the Middle East.

Mr. Cheney and his allies have expressed unease at the decision last week by President Bush and Ms. Rice to proceed with an agreement to supply North Korea with economic aid in return for the North’s disabling its nuclear reactor. Those officials argued that the Israeli intelligence demonstrates that North Korea cannot be trusted. They also argue that the United States should be prepared to scuttle the agreement unless North Korea admits to its dealing with the Syrians.

During a breakfast meeting on Oct. 2 at the White House, Ms. Rice and her chief North Korea negotiator, Christopher R. Hill, made the case to President Bush that the United States faced a choice: to continue with the nuclear pact with North Korea as a way to bring the secretive country back into the diplomatic fold and give it the incentive to stop proliferating nuclear material; or to return to the administration’s previous strategy of isolation, which detractors say left North Korea to its own devices and led it to test a nuclear device last October.

Mr. Cheney and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, also attended the meeting, administration officials said.

The Israeli strike occurred at a particularly delicate time for American diplomatic efforts. In addition to the North Korean nuclear negotiations, the White House is also trying to engineer a regional Middle East peace conference that would work toward a comprehensive peace accord between Arabs and Israelis.

The current and former American officials said Israel presented the United States with intelligence over the summer about what it described as nuclear activity in Syria. Officials have said Israel told the White House shortly in advance of the September raid that it was prepared to carry it out, but it is not clear whether the White House took a position then about whether the attack was justified. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Never has a story been told at such length while revealing so little.

Ever since this story broke, among the neocons, the engine that has kept it running is this bizarre proposition: the unprecedented Israeli veil of secrecy concerning the nature of its target is what “proves” that the target was so significant. But on the contrary, what the secrecy has done is create on open field for speculation ranging from this being a “dry run” in preparation for an attack on Iran (though since that would have undermined the element of surprise, a bit of Iran-directed saber rattling is more plausible); a demonstration of Israel’s ability to disable Syria’s air defenses (though it’s hard to understand why, if they could do this, Israel would want to publicize the fact and thereby give their adversaries a heads-up); and of course, an attack on a “nuclear facility.” And whereas last month it was being reported that Israeli commandos had gathered “samples” at the site providing forensic evidence of the connection to North Korea (North Korean mud off a North Korean boot?), we’re now told that “officials disagree … whether the accumulated evidence points to a Syrian nuclear program that poses a significant threat to the Middle East.” Strip away New York Times waffle, and that can be read as, there is no clear evidence that there is anything qualified to be called a Syrian nuclear program.

When it comes to the known facts, at this point we don’t actually know for a fact that Israel did anything more than penetrate Syrian air space. One of the few journalists who has actually attempted to report this story by visiting the location of the “strike” was told by locals that they heard sonic booms but no explosions.

How many more weeks do we have to wait before the neocon rumor mill runs out of steam and we can conclude what could have been assumed well before now: the reason the veil of secrecy has been held down so tight is because there’s nothing behind it!

As for my own theory about what happened, it is this: Israel’s new defense minister and would-be future prime minister, Ehud Barak, wanted to demonstrate that he’s a man of action who can restore Israel’s military pride after last year’s disastrous performance in Lebanon. The “strike” was a fake act of war in which the IAF gambled that Syria would not rise to the bait. The absolute secrecy was intended to hide this risky charade. Instead it provided an open season for neocon rumormongering about North Korea, Iran, the State Department and any other conceivable target of opportunity.

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VIDEO: On the racetrack to Armageddon with Pastor Hagee

Christians United for Israel
Bill Moyers Journal, October 5, 2007

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL reports on the politically powerful group Christians United for Israel, whose leader, Pastor John Hagee, advocates for a preemptive strike against Iran. [watch video]

Editor’s Comment — Fascinating report. But the one piece of this story that gets left out is the likelihood that CUFI — along with other right wing Christian groups — look increasingly likely to destroy the organization they most empowered: the GOP.

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NEWS: Supreme Court cover-up

Supreme Court won’t hear torture appeal
By David Stout, New York Times, October 9, 2007

A German citizen who said he was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and tortured in a prison in Afghanistan lost his last chance to seek redress in court today when the Supreme Court declined to consider his case.

The justices’ refusal to take the case of Khaled el-Masri let stand a March 2 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va. That court upheld a 2006 decision by a federal district judge, who dismissed Mr. Masri’s lawsuit on the grounds that trying the case could expose state secrets. [complete article]

See also, Lost opportunity to review government’s abuse of “state secrets” (ACLU).

Editor’s Comment — Just when it would be most inconvenient for the administration to be forced to answer questions about its use of torture, the Supreme Court steps in and saves the day – a good day for Bush and another blow to democracy.

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Will Blackwater face Iraqi law?

NEWS: Will Blackwater face Iraqi law?
Iraqi authorities seek Blackwater ouster
By Steven R. Hurst and Qassim Abdul-Zahra, AP, October 8, 2007

Iraqi authorities want the U.S. government to sever all contracts in Iraq with Blackwater USA within six months. They also want the firm to pay $8 million in compensation to families of each of the 17 people killed when its guards sprayed a traffic circle with heavy machine gun fire last month.

The demands — part of an Iraqi government report examined by The Associated Press — also called on U.S. authorities to hand over the Blackwater security agents involved in the Sept. 16 shootings to face possible trial in Iraqi courts.

The tone of the Iraqi report appears to signal further strains between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the White House over the deaths in Nisoor Square — which have prompted a series of U.S. and Iraqi probes and raised questions over the use of private security contractors to guard U.S. diplomats and other officials.

Al-Maliki ordered the investigation by his defense minister and other top security and police officials on Sept. 22. The findings — which were translated from Arabic by AP — mark the most definitive Iraqi positions and contentions about the shootings last month. [complete article]

Blackwater chief at nexus of military and business
By James Risen, New York Times, October 8, 2007

Erik D. Prince, the crew-cut, square-jawed founder of Blackwater USA, the security contractor now at the center of a political storm in both Washington and Baghdad, is a man seemingly born to play a leading role in the private sector side of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He is both a former member of the Navy Seals and the scion of a fabulously wealthy, deeply religious family that is enmeshed in Republican Party politics. As a result, the 38-year-old Mr. Prince stands at the nexus between American Special Operations, which has played such a critical role in the war operations, and the nation’s political and business elite, who have won enormous government contracts as war operations have increasingly been outsourced.

Republican political connections ran deep in his family long before Mr. Prince founded Blackwater in 1997. When he was a teenager, religious conservative leaders like Gary Bauer, now the president of American Values, were house guests. James C. Dobson, the founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, gave the eulogy at his father’s funeral in 1995. “Dr. and Mrs. Dobson are friends with Erik Prince and his mother, Elsa Broekhuizen,” Focus on the Family said in a statement. [complete article]

See also, Iraqis tell of guards’ reckless behavior (LAT) and State Dept. ignored Blackwater warnings (LAT).

Editor’s Comment — It has frequently been reported that Blackwater operates in Iraq with legal immunity. Now AP reports that the Iraqi government says otherwise:

It said Blackwater’s license to operate in Iraq expired on June 2, 2006, meaning it had no immunity from prosecution under Iraqi laws set down after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

What’s Erik Prince’s response to that?

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FEATURE & EDITOR’S COMMENT: A romantic’s anguish

Kanan Makiya – regrets only?
By Dexter Filkins, New York Times, October 7, 2007

Kanan Makiya spent years in exile advocating the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The war he supported brought about an Iraq he never imagined.

makiya.jpgWhere did it go wrong? Makiya asks himself. Or, more precisely, where did he go wrong? It’s the second question that Makiya is finding the most troubling, for it concerns a lifetime of believing, as he puts it, that hope can triumph over experience. “I want to look into myself, look at myself, delve into the assumptions I had before the war,” he told me.

Makiya’s life is no longer what it was. In 2003, on returning to Iraq, he reunited with his sweetheart from high-school days, married and took her back to Cambridge. He also found out he has chronic lymphocytic leukemia, the same disease that killed Edward Said, the Palestinian-born Columbia University professor and Makiya’s intellectual nemesis.

On Iraq, he says, there certainly were clues before the war began — for instance, that meeting in the Oval Office with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice, two months before the war. Sitting across his wide desk from Makiya, President Bush declared that the United States was launching not one campaign but two, the first to topple Hussein and the second to rebuild Iraq. Makiya recalls: “Bush turned to Rice, who was seated on the other side of the room, and he said to her, Our preparations for rebuilding Iraq are well advanced, right? And Rice looked down. She could not look him in the eye. And she said, Yes, Mr. President. She looked at the floor.”

That the Americans committed error after error in Iraq, Makiya takes as a given: their biggest mistake, he maintains, was the decision to occupy Iraq and govern the country themselves, rather than allowing the Iraqis to take over. “I did not want to see the United States micromanage Iraqi affairs because, I feared, that is where things might go wrong,” he said. Makiya now believes, though he did not at the time, that the Iraqi Army should have been held together, that the bad people could have been culled and the rest of it left intact. “We had this phobia of the army, that it would be used domestically, that it would mount coups, that it would get involved in domestic politics,” he told me. “That was a mistake.”

Editor’s Comment — Dexter Filkins provides a conclusion that, as yet, Makiya is reluctant to articulate: “You exposed a terrible dictatorship, and for the noblest of motives you signed on to an invasion that ended in catastrophe. You misjudged your native country, and your adopted one too.”

Makiya’s misjudgment of America is no more clearly evident than in his hope that having toppled Saddam, the US would then defer to Iraqis in the reconstruction of their own country. Such a hope could only be entertained by those who chose to ignore the overarching motive of the Bush administration: that toppling of Saddam would repudiate the challenge posed by 9/11 by demonstrating to the world America’s supreme military might. In other words, what Makiya chose to ignore was that George Bush and Dick Cheney didn’t give a fuck about Iraq, per se.

Yet this particular error of judgment — one among many that have spawned no end of if-onlys, dreamed of as precursors to a happy ending — seems to be a way of glossing over the most fundamental error: the presumption that a bunch of exiles living comfortable lives in the West, had either the right or ability to assume an instrumental role in determining the fate of a remembered nation that animated their thoughts but that only from a distance shaped their lives.

In Makiya’s view, the one person who could have stopped [the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-]Hakim and his like-minded cohorts — the one person who could have slowed Iraq’s gallop toward civil war — was Ahmad Chalabi. If Iraq was going to turn out like South Africa, Makiya reasoned, then it would need its Mandela — someone who could rise above revenge and parochial interests and steer the country toward a united future. Makiya said he believed that Chalabi could have been Iraq’s Mandela.

Editor’s Comment — The difference between Nelson Mandela and Ahmad Chalabi is the difference between a cell in Robben Island maximum security prison and an apartment in London’s Mayfair. It’s the difference between being willing to sacrifice ones own life for what one believes in, versus the willingness to sacrifice the lives of others. Kanan Makiya will likely wrestle with his doubts and his anguish for the rest of his life, but he chooses to do so in the comfort of his Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, rather than the turmoil of Iraq. That speaks louder than any of his words.

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OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Human values transcend American values

On torture and American values
Editorial, New York Times, October 7, 2007

Lawmakers, who for too long have been bullied and intimidated by the White House, should rewrite the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act to conform with actual American laws and values.

For the rest of the nation, there is an immediate question: Is this really who we are?

Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters? [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — In its effort to affect a populist stance, the New York Times asks whether it is truly American to engage in torture. This is part of the never-ending narcissistic contest over who gets to write the dominant narrative in the American mythology. Outside that contest, the question is easy to answer. If Americans are doing it and they are following the directions of the US government, then yes, torture is as American as a B-2 bomber.

America will not reclaim the moral high ground it has reserved for itself by declaring, “We won’t torture you because we’re American.” It should be, “We won’t torture you because you’re a human being.” Of course, that’s a difficult declaration to make when so many Americans have come to regard “the enemy” as less than human.

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: When anthropologist becomes counter-insurgency technician

Army enlists anthropology in war zones
By David Rohde, New York Times, October 7, 2007

In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Anthropologists can now save lives and help win the war on terrorism. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people,” says Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. The Pentagon has turned into the Peace Corps! Right.

Not surprisingly, when it’s for internal consumption the story becomes a little different. In a presentation at the Pentagon earlier this year, an official reported that mapping the human terrain “enables the entire Kill Chain for the GWOT [Global War on Terrorism].” And as it applies to the US air force, here’s how the “kill chain” is described:

Because enemies have learned to limit the amount of time they and their weapons are in sight and thus vulnerable, these mobile targets require a different approach. The Air Force must compress its six-stage target cycle of Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, and Assess, also known as F2T2EA, or, more simply, the “kill chain.”

Concerned anthropologists such a Roberto Gonzalez are asking, “Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician?” By the Pentagon’s own admission there appears to be none. Instead of being deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps anthropologists could do more useful work inside the Pentagon itself.

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NEWS, ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Torture is more than interrogation

Debate erupts on techniques used by C.I.A.
By David Johnston and Scott Shane, New York Times, October 5, 2007

The disclosure of secret Justice Department legal opinions on interrogation on Thursday set off a bitter round of debate over the treatment of terrorism suspects in American custody and whether Congress has been adequately informed of legal policies.

Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded to see the classified memorandums, disclosed Thursday by The New York Times, that gave the Central Intelligence Agency expansive approval in 2005 for harsh interrogation techniques.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to the acting attorney general, Peter D. Keisler, asking for copies of all opinions on interrogation since 2004.

“I find it unfathomable that the committee tasked with oversight of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program would be provided more information by The New York Times than by the Department of Justice,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote. [complete article]

Bush’s dangerous torture(d) stance
By Massimo Calabresi, Time, October 5, 2007

Every time the Bush Administration is accused of torture, the response from the White House is immediate and unequivocal. When the New York Times reported on its front page Thursday that the Justice Department had issued a secret legal opinion in 2005 approving a combination of particularly tough interrogation tactics, White House spokesperson Dana Perino said, “The bottom line is that we do not use torture.” When Congress and the White House battled over detainee rights in 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney argued that techniques like simulated drowning didn’t amount to torture. And last August, after the New Yorker reported the latest in a string of private memos sent to the U.S. government by the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) asserting that U.S. interrogation techniques were “tantamount to torture”, President Bush said curtly, “We don’t torture.”

The Administration says its firm, absolutist assertions are designed to protect U.S. troops in case they are captured: by insisting the U.S. doesn’t torture, the hope is others will feel compelled to refrain from doing so. But in practice, the Administration’s declarations have exactly the opposite effect. It’s not just that Washington has very little credibility on the issue, given all the evidence linking the U.S. to torture that has surfaced in recent years, including the opinion of the international body charged with observing detainee treatment. More importantly, by continuing to battle with the ICRC and other international organizations over the definition of torture, the Bush Administration is undermining those groups and diminishing their chances of protecting captured U.S. troops in the future. [complete article]

See also, Bush Says U.S. ‘does not torture’ (WP).

Editor’s Comment — There’s a dimension of torture that has been excluded from virtually all the debate. What is referred to by some as torture is officially called interrogation, yet the assumption that these techniques are being applied strictly for the purpose of gaining information is rarely questioned. Even so, the war on terrorism was declared and has been carried out as an implicit act of retribution — a grand re-setting of the balance of power on a global stage. In that context, it would be surprising if those tasked with the job of asserting American power would not translate that duty into their own acts of extra-judicial punishment: torture applied to those who the president, the vice-president and the secretary of defense had unequivocally described as “the worst of the worst.”

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