Category Archives: Bush Administration

NEWS: Getting out of Iraq; the Awakening under threat

Attacks imperil U.S.-backed militias in Iraq
By Solomon Moore and Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times, January 24, 2008

American-backed Sunni militias who have fought Sunni extremists to a standstill in some of Iraq’s bloodiest battlegrounds are being hit with a wave of assassinations and bomb attacks, threatening a fragile linchpin of the military’s strategy to pacify the nation.

At least 100 predominantly Sunni militiamen, known as Awakening Council members or Concerned Local Citizens, have been killed in the past month, mostly around Baghdad and the provincial capital of Baquba, urban areas with mixed Sunni and Shiite populations, according to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. At least six of the victims were senior Awakening leaders, Iraqi officials said.

Violence is also shaking up the Awakening movement, many of whose members are former insurgents, in its birthplace in the Sunni heartland of Anbar Province. On Sunday, a teenage suicide bomber exploded at a gathering of Awakening leaders, killing Hadi Hussein al-Issawi, a midlevel sheik, and three other tribesmen.

Born nearly two years ago in Iraq’s western deserts, the Awakening movement has grown to an 80,000-member nationwide force, four-fifths of whose members are Sunnis. American military officials credit that force, along with the surge in United States troops, the Mahdi Army’s self-imposed cease-fire and an increase in Iraqi security forces, for a precipitous drop in civilian and military fatalities since July.

But the recent onslaught is jeopardizing that relative security and raising the prospect that the groups’ members might disperse, with many rejoining the insurgency, American officials said. [complete article]

A lesson in how to create Iraqi orphans. And then how to make life worse for them
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, January 24, 2008

It’s not difficult to create orphans in Iraq. If you’re an insurgent, you can blow yourself up in a crowded market. If you’re an American air force pilot, you can bomb the wrong house in the wrong village. Or if you’re a Western mercenary, you can fire 40 bullets into the widowed mother of 14-year-old Alice Awanis and her sisters Karoon and Nora, the first just 20, the second a year older. But when the three girls landed at Amman airport from Baghdad last week they believed that they were free of the horrors of Baghdad and might travel to Northern Ireland to escape the terrible memory of their mother’s violent death.

Alas, the milk of human kindness does not necessarily extend to orphans from Iraq – the country we invaded for supposedly humanitarian reasons, not to mention weapons of mass destruction. For as their British uncle waited for them at Queen Alia airport, Jordanian security men – refusing him even a five-minute conversation with the girls – hustled the sisters back on to the plane for Iraq. [complete article]

Democrats attack Iraq security proposal
By Michael Abramowitz, Washington Post, January 24, 2008

The leading Democratic presidential candidates and their allies on Capitol Hill have launched fierce attacks in recent days on a White House plan to forge a new, long-term security agreement with the Iraqi government, complaining that the administration is trying to lock in a lasting U.S. military presence in Iraq before the next president takes office.

Among the top critics is Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). She has used the past two Democratic presidential debates to blast President Bush for his effort, as she put it Monday in South Carolina, “to try to bind the United States government and his successor to his failed policy.”

Her concerns have been echoed by Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and other Democratic lawmakers who are focusing their fire on the administration’s plans for a long-term commitment to Iraq, after gaining little traction for their efforts to force a faster withdrawal of U.S. combat troops there. [complete article]

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OPINION: Escaping the Israeli siege

Hamas blows a hole in Bush’s plans
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, January 23, 2008

The hole blown by Hamas in the Gaza-Egypt border fence has finally punctured the bubble of delusion surrounding the U.S.-Israeli Middle East policy. In a moment reminiscent of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, gazawall.jpgthrough the breach surged some 350,000 Palestinians — fully one fifth of Gaza’s total population, as my friend and colleague Tim McGirk observed at the scene. And what did they do on the other side? They went shopping for the essentials of daily life, denied them by an Israeli siege imposed with the Wehrmacht logic of collective punishment. And the Egyptian security forces didn’t stop them, despite Washington and Israel urging them to, because U.S.-backed strongman Hosni Mubarak would provoke a mutiny among his citizenry and even his own security forces if they were to be ordered to stop hungry Palestinians from eating because Israel has decided that they should starve until they change their attitude. [complete article]

See also, Hamas exposes Israeli weakness in Gaza (Reuters) and Hamas ‘spent months cutting through Gaza wall in secret operation’ (The Times).

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OPINION: How to sink America

Capitalism’s enemies within
By Robert J. Samuelson, Washington Post, January 23, 2008

Amid the mayhem on world financial markets, it is becoming clear that capitalism’s most dangerous enemies are capitalists. No one can have watched the “subprime mortgage” debacle without noticing the absurd contrast between the magnitude of the failure and the lavish rewards heaped on those who presided over it. At Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, large losses on subprime securities cost chief executives their jobs — and they left with multimillion-dollar pay packages. Stanley O’Neal, the ex-head of Merrill, received an estimated $161 million. [complete article]

Why the debt crisis is now the greatest threat to the American republic
By Chalmers Johnson, TomDispatch, January 22, 2008

There are three broad aspects to our debt crisis. First, in the current fiscal year (2008) we are spending insane amounts of money on “defense” projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States. Simultaneously, we are keeping the income tax burdens on the richest segments of the American population at strikingly low levels.

Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures — so-called “military Keynesianism,” which I discuss in detail in my book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic. By military Keynesianism, I mean the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true.

Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources), we are failing to invest in our social infrastructure and other requirements for the long-term health of our country. These are what economists call “opportunity costs,” things not done because we spent our money on something else. Our public education system has deteriorated alarmingly. We have failed to provide health care to all our citizens and neglected our responsibilities as the world’s number one polluter. Most important, we have lost our competitiveness as a manufacturer for civilian needs — an infinitely more efficient use of scarce resources than arms manufacturing. Let me discuss each of these. [complete article]

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NEWS, ANALYSIS & FEATURE: Orchestrated deception on the path to war

False pretenses
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, Center for Public Integrity, January 23, 2008

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war. [complete article]

See also, British government ordered to disclose draft Iraq dossier (The Guardian).

Troops felled by a ‘trust gap’
By Mark Perry, Asia Times, January 24, 2008

For many among the senior leadership at the Pentagon… the apparent successful spread of the “Awakening of the Tribes Movement” has been tempered by the realization that the initiative put in place in Fallujah and Ramadi and Babil could have been – and should have been – put into practice five years ago.

Pentagon officials are quick to blame former Iraq czar L Paul Bremer of the US Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for the failure. “We’re reconstituting the Iraqi military, that’s all this is” a Pentagon official notes. “A lot of these guys in Babil that we’re paying lost their salaries when Bremer disbanded the Republican Guard and broke up the Ba’ath Party. It was a stupid move. So this is a make-good.”

Another Pentagon official remembers the opening to Gaood in 2004: “This should have been done then,” he says, “and I don’t understand why it wasn’t. Think of the blood, the enormous loss of life, the lost prestige, the failures.” Pentagon officers are also quick to point out that, while Petraeus has taken credit for the shift in strategy in Iraq, the “Awakening of the Tribes Movement” actually began long before he recommended an increase in American troops levels in the country. [complete article]

Iraq’s new law on ex-Baathists could bring another purge
By Amit R. Paley and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, January 23, 2008

Maj. Gen. Hussein al-Awadi, a former official in Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, became the commander of the Iraqi National Police despite a 2003 law barring the party from government.

But now, under new legislation promoted as way to return former Baathists to public life, the 56-year-old and thousands like him could be forced out of jobs they have been allowed to hold, according to Iraqi lawmakers and the government agency that oversees ex-Baathists.

“This new law is very confusing,” Awadi said. “I don’t really know what it means for me.”

He is not alone. More than a dozen Iraqi lawmakers, U.S. officials and former Baathists here and in exile expressed concern in interviews that the law could set off a new purge of ex-Baathists, the opposite of U.S. hopes for the legislation.

Approved by parliament this month under pressure from U.S. officials, the law was heralded by President Bush and Iraqi leaders as a way to soothe the deep anger of many ex-Baathists — primarily Sunnis but also many Shiites such as Awadi — toward the Shiite-led government.

Yet U.S. officials and even legislators who voted for the measure, which still requires approval by Iraq’s presidency council, acknowledge that its impact is hard to assess from its text and will depend on how it is implemented. Some say the law’s primary aim is not to return ex-Baathists to work, but to recognize and compensate those harmed by the party. Of the law’s eight stated justifications, none mentions reinstating ex-Baathists to their jobs. [complete article]

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FEATURE: Sibel Edmonds’ claims demand investigation

FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets
By Philip Giraldi, The American Conservative, January 28, 2008

Most Americans have never heard of Sibel Edmonds, and if the U.S. government has its way, they never will. The former FBI translator turned whistleblower tells a chilling story of corruption at Washington’s highest levels—sale of nuclear secrets, shielding of terrorist suspects, illegal arms transfers, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, espionage. She may be a first-rate fabulist, but Edmonds’s account is full of dates, places, and names. And if she is to be believed, a treasonous plot to embed moles in American military and nuclear installations and pass sensitive intelligence to Israeli, Pakistani, and Turkish sources was facilitated by figures in the upper echelons of the State and Defense Departments. Her charges could be easily confirmed or dismissed if classified government documents were made available to investigators.

But Congress has refused to act, and the Justice Department has shrouded Edmonds’s case in the state-secrets privilege, a rarely used measure so sweeping that it precludes even a closed hearing attended only by officials with top-secret security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, such an investigation “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.” [complete article]

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NEWS: Cheney calls for permanent warrantless wiretapping

Cheney calls for permanent warrantless wiretapping
By William Branigin, Washington Post, January 23, 2008

Vice President Cheney called on Congress today to permanently extend the Protect America Act as the White House launched a drive to secure the tools it says are needed to fight a continuing terrorist threat beyond the law’s Feb. 1 expiration.

In a speech to a sympathetic audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, Cheney also said the law must include immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that assisted the U.S. government’s electronic surveillance efforts after Sept. 11, 2001. [complete article]

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FEATURE: U.S. military breaks ranks – part one

A salvo at the White House
By Mark Perry, Asia Times, January 23, 2008

The fact that the Iraq war has been pushed off the front pages of America’s newspapers has given the US military a seeming respite from the almost endless spate of disastrous stories coming out of the Middle East, as well as the almost endless round of embarrassing questions from the press about what they intend to do about it.

But military officers say that the American public should not be fooled: the relative quiet in Iraq – and it is, after all, only a “relative quiet” – does not mean the “surge” has worked, or that the problems facing the US military have somehow magically gone away. Quite the opposite. For while the American public is consumed by the campaign for the presidency, the American military is not. Instead, they are as obsessed now, in January of 2008, with the war in Iraq as they were then, in 2003 – except that now, many military officers admit, the host of problems they face may, in fact, be much more intractable.

“Don’t let the quiet fool you,” a senior defense official says. “There’s still a huge chasm between how the White House views Iraq and how we [in the Pentagon] view Iraq. The White House would like to have you believe the ‘surge’ has worked, that we somehow defeated the insurgency. That’s just ludicrous. There’s increasing quiet in Iraq, but that’s happened because of our shift in strategy – the ‘surge’ had nothing to do with it.” [complete article]

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OPINION: Challenging a unipolar world

Challenging a unipolar world
By Conn Hallinan, FPIP, January 21, 2008

One of the more interesting phenomena to emerge from the U.S. debacle in Iraq is the demise of the unipolar world that rose from the ashes of the Cold War. A short decade ago the United States was the most powerful political, economic, and military force on the planet. Today its army is straining under the weight of an unpopular occupation, its economy is careening toward recession, and the only “allies” we can absolutely depend on in the United Nations are Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands.

Rather than the “American Century” the Bush administration neo-conservatives predicted, it is increasingly a world where regional alliances and trade associations in Europe and South America have risen to challenge Washington’s once undisputed domination. [complete article]

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FEATURE: America’s Iranian invention

Bush’s Iran/Argentina terror frame-up
By Gareth Porter, The Nation, January 18, 2008

Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration’s pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush’s latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city’s Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina “serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies.”

This propaganda campaign depends heavily on a decision last November by the General Assembly of Interpol, which voted to put five former Iranian officials and a Hezbollah leader on the international police organization’s “red list” for allegedly having planned the July 1994 bombing. But the Wall Street Journal reports that it was pressure from the Bush Administration, along with Israeli and Argentine diplomats, that secured the Interpol vote. In fact, the Bush Administration’s manipulation of the Argentine bombing case is perfectly in line with its long practice of using distorting and manufactured evidence to build a case against its geopolitical enemies.

After spending several months interviewing officials at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires familiar with the Argentine investigation, the head of the FBI team that assisted it and the most knowledgeable independent Argentine investigator of the case, I found that no real evidence has ever been found to implicate Iran in the bombing. Based on these interviews and the documentary record of the investigation, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators. [complete article]

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NEWS, ANALYSIS & OPINION: A deadbeat’s peace process

Gaza City plunged into darkness
BBC News, January 20, 2008

The only power plant in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip has shut down because of a lack of fuel, Palestinian officials say, blaming Israeli restrictions.

Gaza City was plunged into darkness after the plant’s turbines stopped.

Israel’s closure of border crossings amid continued rocket fire from Gaza has brought the delivery of almost all supplies, including fuel, to a halt. [complete article]

Senior Saudi prince offers Israel peace vision
By Paul Taylor, Reuters, January 20, 2008

A senior Saudi royal has offered Israel a vision of broad cooperation with the Arab world and people-to-people contacts if it signs a peace treaty and withdraws from all occupied Arab territories.

In an interview with Reuters, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former ambassador to the United States and Britain and adviser to King Abdullah, said Israel and the Arabs could cooperate in many areas including water, agriculture, science and education.

Asked what message he wanted to send to the Israeli public, he said:

“The Arab world, by the Arab peace initiative, has crossed the Rubicon from hostility towards Israel to peace with Israel and has extended the hand of peace to Israel, and we await the Israelis picking up our hand and joining us in what inevitably will be beneficial for Israel and for the Arab world.” [complete article]

The march of cynics
By Meron Benvenisti, Haaretz, January 18, 2008

The prize for the most sharply cynical remark goes to President George W. Bush, who said in Ramallah of the Israel Defense Forces crossing points: “You’ll be happy to hear that my motorcade of a mere 45 cars was able to make it through without being stopped.” No doubt, he was speaking ironically, but even if he added that he wasn’t “so exactly sure that’s what happens to the average person,” he should be reminded of the saying that one doesn’t mention rope in a hanged man’s home. Okay, so there’s a lack of political and human understanding here, but isn’t there even a drop of sensitivity and empathy?

This cynical remark made only the slightest impression on those who heard it. After all, the people who met with Bush are not the ones who are exposed to the humiliations that thousands go through at the barriers every day, and they even receive VIP treatment. Why should they express dissatisfaction with a spontaneous bit of nonsense when they feel no need to react to a stupid thing that someone in Bush’s retinue formulated for the president? “Swiss cheese isn’t going to work when it comes to the outline of a state. And I mean that,” declared Bush. Right after that he said the drawing up of the future border will reflect the current reality. But it is the reality of the settlement blocs that has created the “Swiss cheese.” [complete article]

Middle East triangle
By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, Washington Post, January 17, 2008

Nervous about being left out, all three parties are laboring mightily to avert an understanding between the other two. Hamas threatens the nascent Israeli-Palestinian political process, challenging its legitimacy and intimating that it could resort to more violence. Israel warns that renewed Palestinian unity will bring that process to an abrupt halt. Abbas actively discourages any third-party contact with Hamas. The end result is collective checkmate, a political standstill that hurts all and serves none.

The truth is, none of these two-way deals is likely to succeed. In tandem, no two parties are capable enough to deliver; any one party is potent enough to be a spoiler. There can be neither Israeli-Palestinian stability nor a peace accord without Hamas’s acquiescence. Intra-Palestinian reconciliation will not last without Israel’s unspoken assent and willingness to lift its siege. Any agreement between Hamas and Israel over Abbas’s strong objection is hard to imagine.

For any of these dances to go forward, all will have to go forward. Synchronicity is key. Fatah and Hamas will need to reach a new political arrangement, this time not one vigorously opposed by Israel. Hamas and Israel will need to achieve a cease-fire and prisoner exchange, albeit mediated by Abbas. And Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will need to negotiate a political deal with Abbas, who will have to receive a mandate to do so from Hamas. The current mind-set, in which each side considers dealmaking by the other two to be a mortal threat, could be replaced by one in which all three couplings are viewed as mutually reinforcing. For that, the parties’ allies ought to cast aside their dysfunctional, destructive, ideologically driven policies. Instead, they should encourage a choreography that minimizes violence and promotes a serious diplomatic process. Otherwise, no matter how many times President Bush travels to the region, there is no reason to believe that 2008 will offer anything other than the macabre pattern of years past. [complete article]

Not on the itinerary
By Daniel Levy, The Guardian, January 18, 2008

Take a president who rarely travels overseas and certainly not for extended periods of time. Add the region of the world most associated with this administration and most in turmoil. Throw in the president’s first visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories after seven years in office. What do you get? Remarkably little, as it turns out.

President Bush’s eight-day tour of the Middle East registered barely an above-the-fold headline in the major American and international newspapers. Perhaps the subject of greatest speculation was how a president, famous for maintaining a schoolboy’s bedtime curfew, would cope with the late Arabian nights. But Bush’s Middle East trip was of some importance – as much for what didn’t happen, as for what did. Paradoxically, an administration guided by a transformational vision of the application of American power was now displaying the limitations of its role – limitations partially created by its own failures. [complete article]

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NEWS: Canadian government embarrasses itself

Torture awareness manual ‘wrongly’ lists Cdn allies, to be rewritten: Bernier
Canadian Press, January 19, 2008

Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier found himself backtracking Saturday over his department’s training manual that lists the U.S. and Guantanamo Bay as sites of possible torture – alongside such countries as Iran and Syria.

In a statement, Bernier said he regretted the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, adding that it contains a list that “wrongly” includes some of Canada’s closest allies.

Bernier said the manual is neither a policy document, nor a statement of policy, and that he has directed it to be reviewed and rewritten. [complete article]

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NEWS & ANALYSIS: Developments in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Pakistan military retreats from Musharraf’s influence
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy, January 18, 2008

As President Pervez Musharraf grows more unpopular in Pakistan, his newly named successor as army chief is seeking to distance the institution from the Musharraf regime and pull back its virtual occupation of the top senior ranks of civilian ministries and state corporations.

Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was named to the top military job in late November, took two steps this week. First, he barred all senior military officers from meeting directly with Musharraf without prior approval and prohibited officers from having any direct involvement in politics. Second, he recalled many army officers from civilian job assignments.

Kayani’s new path could help restore the image of a military that’s bruised by association with Musharraf’s excesses during eight years of rule since a 1999 coup and weakened by the worsening domestic security situation. [complete article]

Frontier insurgency spills Into Peshawar
By Jane Perlez, New York Times, January 18, 2008

At the core of the troubles here, many say, lie demands by the United States that the Pakistani military, generously financed by Washington, join in its campaign against terrorism, which means killing fellow Pakistanis in the tribal areas. Even if those Pakistanis are extremists, the people here say, they do not like a policy of killing fellow tribesmen, and fellow countrymen, particularly on behalf of the United States.

The Bush administration is convinced that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have gained new strength in the past two years, particularly in the tribal regions of North and South Waziristan and Bajaur. It has said it is considering sending American forces to help the Pakistani soldiers in those areas. Mr. Musharraf has scoffed at the idea.

Any direct intervention by American forces would only strengthen the backlash now under way against soldiers and the police in Peshawar, said Farook Adam Khan, a lawyer here. That reaction spread last week to Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, where a suicide bomber killed almost two dozen policemen at a lawyers’ rally, he said.

“Pakistani soldiers never used to be targets,” Mr. Khan said. “Now we have the radicals antagonized by Musharraf and his politics of cozying up to the United States.” [complete article]

Militants make a claim for talks
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 18, 2008

Islamabad has tried to defuse the situation by negotiating with selected Taliban leaders. Most recently, a Pakistani Taliban shura (council) headed by Hafiz Gul Bahadur in North Waziristan responded positively to a government offer of a ceasefire, despite opposition from Takfiri elements who view non-practicing Muslims as infidels.

The backlash was immediate. Militants launched attacks in Mohmand Agency, followed by Wednesday’s mass assault.

This response is orchestrated by al-Qaeda from its camps around the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan. Al-Qaeda views any peace agreements with the Pakistani Taliban as a government maneuver to split the militants, and also says Islamabad has been consistently intransigent over the years.

Al-Qaeda demands that it be the chief interlocutor in any peace talks, and it has set its bottom line: guarantees of the withdrawal of all security forces from the tribal areas; enforcement of sharia law, the release of Maulana Abdul Aziz of the radical Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), who was apprehended last year; and that President Pervez Musharraf step down. [complete article]

Talking to the wrong people
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 19, 2008

Throughout 2007, the British Embassy in Kabul under Sherard Cowper Coles made desperate overtures in southwestern Afghanistan to find a political solution with the Taliban, but without Mullah Omar. Multiple clandestine operations were launched and millions of dollars were funneled to the Taliban.

However, it all came to nothing and only caused serious differences between the two major allies – Britain and the US. And all the time the Taliban consolidated their position in the south.

michael-semple-and-amb-sherard-cowper-coles.jpgThe case of Irishman Michael Semple, who was acting head of the European Union mission in Kabul, is instructive. The fluent Dari-speaking Semple had spent over 18 years in Afghanistan in various capacities, including with the United Nations and as an advisor to the British Embassy in Kabul, before being expelled last month after being accused of talking to the Taliban. [complete article]

See also, Pakistani forces say kill up to 90 militants (Reuters) and Taliban now seriously in the fight, war begins: NGO (AFP).

NATO hears ‘noise before defeat’
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, January 19, 2008

Ashdown’s real mission [– Paddy Ashdown is the UN’s newly appointed special envoy to Afghanistan –] lies elsewhere, in addressing the core issue: What do we do with the Taliban? No doubt, the Taliban’s exclusion from the Bonn conference seven years ago proved to be a horrible mistake. That was also how the Afghan and Pakistan problem came to be joined at the hips.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf made a valid point in his interview with the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel this week when he said al-Qaeda isn’t the real problem that faces Pakistan. “I don’t deny the fact that al-Qaeda is operating here [Pakistan]. They are carrying out terrorism in the tribal areas; they are the masterminds behind these suicide bombings. While all of this is true, one thing is for sure: the fanatics can never take over Pakistan. This is not possible. They are militarily not so strong they can defeat our army, with its 500,000 soldiers, nor politically – and they do not stand a chance of winning the elections. They are much too weak for that,” Musharraf said.

The heart of the matter is Pashtun alienation. The Taliban represent Pashtun aspirations. As long as Pashtuns are denied their historical role in Kabul, Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and Pakistan will remain in turmoil. Musharraf said, “There should be a change of strategy right away. You [NATO] should make political overtures to win the Pashtuns over.”

This may also be the raison d’etre of UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s intriguing choice of a Briton as his new special representative. Conceivably, the inscrutable Ban has been told by Washington that Ashdown is just the right man to walk on an upcoming secretive bridge, which will intricately connect New York, Washington, London, Riyadh, Islamabad and Kabul. [complete article]

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NEWS & OPINION: New torture tapes?

Lawyers for detainee refer in filing to more CIA tapes
By Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post, January 19, 2008

Attorneys for a former detainee at a secret CIA prison said in a court filing this week that intelligence officials had falsely claimed in public statements that his interrogations were not videotaped, that all videotaped interrogations stopped in 2002 and that only a small number of CIA detainees were subjected to unusually harsh interrogation techniques.

The basis of the assertions was redacted from the filing by the Bush administration, under an unusually stringent security order that blocks the attorneys for Majid Khan from disclosing evidence of the alleged falsehoods or detailing how Khan was treated while in CIA custody.

Khan, one of 14 detainees whom the CIA secretly imprisoned before transferring them last year to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has said he was systematically tortured. His attorneys at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights have been pressing for a court order to prevent the government from destroying evidence of his treatment. [complete article]

The official story unfolds
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, January 18, 2008

The destruction of the CIA torture tapes is still a fairly young scandal as Washington scandals go. It hasn’t even acquired a “gate” suffix. But the Administration is already busily choreographing it, with the dozens of shiny metal parts clicking away in synchronicity, like a finely designed mechanical watch. There is an admirable efficiency to the political process. If only these people were a fraction as good at the work of government as they are at political shenanigans, I keep thinking. The Bush Administration plan is simple: let’s think of this as a movie–Abu Ghraib, The Sequel. Instead of offering up a group of young grunts for the sacrifice, this time it will be a retired senior management figure at the CIA and some of his subordinates. And this sacrifice will, in the White House’s view, divert attention from the real source of both scandals, which is high in the upper reaches of the Executive Branch. Inside the White House, in fact. [complete article]

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FEATURE: The war on diplomacy

Off target
By Kurt Pitzer, Mother Jones, January/February, 2008

Linda Gallini, one of the State Department’s leading experts on nuclear nonproliferation, stepped into an empty room at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria, and placed a call to Washington. A senior delegate to the iaea, she’d spent the past week strategizing how to keep dangerous materials out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists. But as dusk settled over the Danube that evening in September 2005, Gallini was more worried about what was brewing back home.

When she got her boss, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear nonproliferation Andrew Semmel, on the phone, he confirmed her worst fears. Carrying out a plan announced two months earlier by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, neoconservative political appointees were about to replace some of State’s most knowledgeable wmd experts with Republican loyalists. Gallini’s heart sank. “If that’s what they’re going to do, pretty much everyone else is going to leave,” she said. “Yeah,” she recalls Semmel telling her. “That’s what they want.”

As she resigned a year later, Gallini gave a series of interviews to Mother Jones, providing an insider’s view of how the Bush administration has gutted the nation’s expertise on wmd. Presidents come and go, but State Department staff like Gallini have long been the backbone of U.S. foreign policy—the “ballast,” as she puts it—that keeps political appointees grounded in reality. “Our job is to be the informed, helpful, supportive folks who guide them when they arrive clueless to the issues,” she explains. [complete article]

See also, Burns’ departure muddles nuclear deal (AP).

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NEWS: White House cover-up

White House missing CIA, Iraq e-mails
AP, January 19, 2008

Apparent gaps in White House e-mail archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.

The gaps — 473 days over a period of 20 months — are cited in a chart prepared by White House computer technicians and shared in September with the House Reform and Government Oversight Committee, which has been looking into reports of missing e-mail.

Among the times for which e-mail may not have been archived from Vice President Dick Cheney’s office are four days in early October 2003, just as a federal probe was beginning into the leak of Valerie Plame’s CIA identity, an inquiry that eventually ensnared Cheney’s chief of staff.

Contents of the chart — which the White House now disputes — were disclosed Thursday by Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who chairs the House committee, as he announced plans for a Feb. 15 hearing. [complete article]

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NEWS: Bush coddles tyrants

Bush lauds Egypt leader, avoiding record on dissent
By Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, January 17, 2008

President Bush lavished praise on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt on Wednesday, emphasizing the country’s role in regional security and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process while publicly avoiding mention of the government’s actions in jailing or exiling opposition leaders and its severe restrictions on opposition political activities.

Ending an eight-day trip through the Middle East in which he highlighted democratic change as the foundation for peace and security throughout the region, Mr. Bush strikingly avoided direct criticism of Mr. Mubarak, an autocratic leader in power since late 1981. In the past, Mr. Bush criticized Egypt for arresting political dissidents.

“I appreciate very much the long and proud tradition that you’ve had for a vibrant civil society,” said Mr. Bush, whose appearance with Mr. Mubarak was unannounced and, according to the White House, had been uncertain until the last minute.

Mr. Bush’s remarks reflected some of the contradictions evident in the issues he addressed on his trip.

He spoke passionately at times about the birth of liberty and justice in countries that restrict them and the role of women in societies that still largely sequester them.

And yet he avoided public disputes with monarchical leaders widely accused of limiting freedoms as he sought Arab support for the peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, the war in Iraq, diplomatic efforts to isolate Iran and easing the strain on the American economy caused by high oil prices. [complete article]

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The torture cover-up

Station chief made appeal to destroy CIA tapes
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, January 16, 2008

Those known to have counseled against the tapes’ destruction include John B. Bellinger III, while serving as the National Security Council’s top legal adviser; Harriet E. Miers, while serving as the top White House counsel; George J. Tenet, while serving as CIA director; [Scott W.] Muller, while serving as the CIA’s general counsel; and John D. Negroponte, while serving as director of national intelligence.

Hayden, in an interview, said the advice expressed by administration lawyers was consistent. “To the degree this was discussed outside the agency, everyone counseled caution,” he said. But he said that, in 2005, it was “the agency’s view that there were no legal impediments” to the tapes’ destruction. There also was “genuine concern about agency people being identified,” were the tapes ever to be made public.

Hayden, who became CIA director last year, acknowledged that the questions raised about the tapes’ destruction, then and now, are legitimate. “One can ask if it was a good idea, or if there was a better way to do it,” he said. “We are very happy to let the facts take us where they will.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The top officials here were either duplicitous or incompetant or both. The decision-making process carries the signature of the Bush-Cheney administration. It’s all about being able to act and evade responsibility. Under the leadership of a frat boy president, no one wants to carry the accountability that Bush himself refuses to bear.

Special counsel sought in CIA tapes case
AP, January 16, 2008

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and 18 other House Democrats on Tuesday asked the attorney general to replace a government prosecutor with an outside lawyer to investigate the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes. [complete article]

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NEWS & OPINION: Bush’s effort to undermine the NIE

Artificial intelligence
By Fred Kaplan, Slate, January 14, 2008

President George W. Bush hasn’t accomplished much on his voyage to the Middle East, but he did take the time to inflict another wound on the entire U.S. intelligence community—and on the credibility of anything he might ever again say about the world.

In the latest Newsweek, Michael Hirsh reports that, during a private conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Bush “all but disowned” the agencies’ Dec. 3 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. A “senior administration official who accompanied Bush” on the trip confided to Hirsh that Bush “told the Israelis that he can’t control what the intelligence community says, but that [the NIE’s] conclusions don’t reflect his own views.” [complete article]

In Iran reversal, bureaucrats
triumphed over Cheney team
By Jay Solomon and Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, January 14, 2008

Senior officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the umbrella organization that coordinates the U.S.’s 16 spy agencies and that oversaw the report, say payback wasn’t a factor. They defend the report as a righting of the ship after the Iraq intelligence failures.

Hundreds of officials were involved and thousands of documents were drawn upon in this report, according to the DNI, making it impossible for any official to overly sway it. Intelligence sources were vetted and questioned in ways they weren’t ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Thomas Fingar, 62 years old, is one of the lead architects of the Iran report. A veteran State Department official, Mr. Fingar helped lead the office that argued in 2002 that evidence of Iraq’s nuclear program was faulty. He is now a senior official at the DNI.

Of the backlash against the report, Mr. Fingar says, “A lot of it is just nonsense. The idea that this thing was written by a bunch of nonprofessional renegades or refugees is just silly.” [complete article]

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