While the token of loyalty that the Israel lobby demanded from the Democrats on Wednesday was the undemocratic reinstatement of an affirmation of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, curiously another piece of doting flattery from the 2008 platform — “our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy” — has been dropped.
Allies cooperate and they also function with autonomy. The relationship that the Israel lobby insists on securing, however, is one of absolute subservience in which the United States bows without question to Israeli demands with no semblance of the mutual respect that real allies afford each other. If or when the U.S should attack Iran is, supposedly, a matter for Israelis to decide, so why bother with the pretense that Israel be called ‘our strongest ally’?
As for the notion that the U.S. has a vital role to play in mediating a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that’s a thing of the past.
Tony Karon writes: The Obama Administration essentially threw up its hands in December of 2010, forced to accept defeat after two years of trying to complete the peace process.
Today, there’s no prospect of achieving a two-state peace agreement through bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The only change to Jerusalem’s status quo currently underway is the expansion of Israel’s control of the eastern parts of the city it occupied in the war of 1967 — hardly a cause for concern among those who proclaim it the undivided capital of the Jewish State, even if it is routinely denounced as “unhelpful” by a U.S. State Department mindful of the damage that expansion does to the prospects for a peace agreement.
So it’s plausible, albeit unlikely, that the Democrats’ initial omission of any reference to Jerusalem could simply have been an oversight. After all, who in Washington talks to or about the Palestinians any more? When it comes to Israel, the only topic of conversation these days is Iran’s nuclear program.
A few Israeli intellectuals glumly warn that Netanyahu has effectively buried the two-state solution, and that the result will be eventual Palestinian demands for civil rights within a single, common polity. Even Ehud Barak, Netanyahu’s defense minister and fellow Iran hawk, warned early in 2010, “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Barak was describing the status quo in words that would bring a frenzy of denunciation if spoken in the U.S. domestic political mainstream. Apartheid, after all, is the South African term coined for the system of white domination in which black people were denied the rights of citizenship in the state that ruled over them — and it eventually prompted a campaign of international isolation and economic sanctions. The recent decision by South Africa’s post-apartheid government prohibiting products made in occupied territories from being labeled “Made in Israel” could be a portent of things to come in the wider international community.
Henry Siegman writes: The Middle East peace process is dead. More precisely, the two-state solution is dead; the peace process may well go on indefinitely if this Israeli government has its way.
The two-state solution did not die a natural death. It was strangulated as Jewish settlements in the West Bank were expanded and deepened by successive Israeli governments in order to prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. The settlement project has achieved its intended irreversibility, not only because of its breadth and depth but also because of the political clout of the settlers and their supporters within Israel who have both ideological and economic stakes in the settlements’ permanence.
The question can no longer be whether the current impasse may lead to a one-state outcome; it has already done so. There is also no longer any question whether this government’s policies will lead to what can legitimately be called apartheid, as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other Israeli leaders predicted they would. Palestinians live in a one-state reality, deprived of all rights, and enclosed in enclaves surrounded by military checkpoints, separation walls, roadblocks, barbed-wire barriers and a network of “for-Jews-only” highways.
Until now, Israel’s colonial project has been successfully disguised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pretense that he is pursuing a resumption of talks for a two-state solution with President Mahmoud Abbas. It has also been strengthened by the pretense of President Obama and EU leaders that they believe a resumed peace process can still produce a Palestinian state. But these pretenses cannot be sustained for long, if only because of the inability of settlers to restrain triumphalist pronouncements of their achievement of Greater Israel and their defeat of the Palestinians’ hopes for statehood—as Dani Dayan did recently in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and Haaretz, in which he proclaimed that because of the settlements’ irreversibility there will be only one sovereignty west of the Jordan River.
But paradoxically, the triumph of the settlement project contains the seeds of its own reversal—or of the demise of the Zionist project. [Continue reading…]
CNN reports: A tide of anti-Islam sentiment has been swelling across America in recent months, strong enough to prompt one imam to wish for the days immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when President George W. Bush declared that Muslims were not our enemies; that the war on terror was against a select few who acted upon their hate for America.
“In the 11 years since, we have retreated,” says Abdullah Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University who likes to call himself the Blue Devil Imam.
Muslims make up less than 1% of the U.S. population. Yet, say Muslim advocates, they are a community besieged.
Hate crimes against Muslims spiked 50% in 2010, the last year for which FBI statistics are available. That was in a year marked by Muslim-bashing speech over the Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan and Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ threats to burn Qurans.
Antepli likens the current climate to McCarthyism. Left unchecked, he says, anti-Muslim fervor, like racism and anti-Semitism, has the potential to evolve into something dangerous.
This year’s holy month of Ramadan, which ended August 19, was marred by a spate of violence at U.S. Islamic centers that included a fire, a homemade bomb and pig parts. The incidents were unprecedented in scale and scope, says the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
At least seven mosques and one cemetery were attacked in the United States during Ramadan, according to the council and other groups that track such incidents.
Particularly visible on the anti-Muslim radar has been the state of Tennessee, where a mosque opened during Ramadan after two years of controversy. The new Islamic center in Murfreesboro opened a few weeks ago after delays caused by legal wrangling, community protests and vandalism.
Also in Tennessee, incumbent congresswoman Diane Black found herself publicly opposing Sharia after her opponent Lou Ann Zelenik made it a campaign issue.
State senatorial candidate Woody Degan’s website also mentions Sharia:
“VOTE CONSERVATIVE! VOTE Anti-Sharia, VOTE Against Internet Taxes, Vote FOR Gun Carry Rights! VOTE for your PERSONAL RIGHTS!”
And Gov. Bill Haslam recently came under fire for hiring lawyer Samar Ali, a Muslim woman from Tennessee, to work in the international division of the state’s economic development department.
Ali’s critics called her Sharia-compliant and a website called Bill H(Islam) attacked the governor for pursuing “a policy that promotes the interest of Islamist (sic) and their radical ideology.”
The website links to another that discusses, among other things, Islamic infiltration of public schools.
“I cannot stress enough the seriousness of their push to spread their religion to all non-Muslims throughout our country,” says website author Cathy Hinners, another speaker at next Tuesday’s 9/11 event in Franklin.
“Why? Why are Muslims so adamant that we accept their religion? The answer is simple. The answer is in black and white. The answer is in the Muslim brotherhoods “Strategic Goal for North America.” It’s called a global caliphate. One religion, one government, one law… called Sharia.”
In November 2010, more than 70% of voters in Oklahoma approved a ballot initiative to amend the state’s constitution that banned courts from looking at “legal precepts of other nations or cultures. Specifically, the courts shall not consider international law or Sharia law.”
The amendment died after a federal court ruled it discriminatory.
“That was very explicitly anti-Islamic,” says Glenn Hendrix, an Atlanta lawyer who specializes in international law. “It specifically referenced Sharia.”
This year, 33 anti-Sharia or international law bills were introduced in 20 states, making it a key issue. Six states – Louisiana, South Dakota, Kansas, Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee – adopted such laws prior to 2012.
Two Tennessee lawmakers attempted to pass a bill this year that would have made it a felony to practice Sharia, but it failed.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations says the anti-Sharia bills are based on draft legislation promoted by David Yerushalmi, an anti-Islamic lawyer from New York. [Continue reading…]
Chris Woods writes: When news flashed of an air strike on a vehicle in the Yemeni city of Radaa on Sunday afternoon, early claims that al-Qaida militants had died soon gave way to a more grisly reality.
At least 10 civilians had been killed, among them women and children. It was the worst loss of civilian life in Yemen’s brutal internal war since May 2012. Somebody had messed up badly. But was the United States or Yemen responsible?
Local officials and eyewitnesses were clear enough. The Radaa attack was the work of a US drone – a common enough event. Since May 2011, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recorded up to 116 US drone strikes in Yemen, part of a broader covert war aimed at crushing Islamist militants. But of those attacks, only 39 have been confirmed by officials as the work of the US.
The attribution of dozens of further possible drone attacks – and others reportedly involving US ships and conventional aircraft – remains unclear. Both the CIA and Pentagon are fighting dirty wars in Yemen, each with a separate arsenal and kill list. Little wonder that hundreds of deaths remain in a limbo of accountability.
With anger rising at the death of civilians in Radaa, Yemen’s government stepped forward to take the blame. It claimed that its own air force had carried out the strike on moving vehicles after receiving “faulty intelligence“. Yet the Yemeni air force is barely fit for purpose.
And why believe the Yemeni defence ministry anyway? Just 48 hours earlier it had made similar claims. But when it emerged that alleged al-Qaida bomber Khaled Musalem Batis had died in a strike, anonymous officials soon admitted that a US drone had carried out that killing. [Continue reading…]
Noah Shachtman writes: President Obama doesn’t like to talk about how he uses drones to kill suspected militants — including American citizens. Explanations about who gets picked for remote-control death and who does the picking are left to underlings and aides. Just a few days ago, for example, Obama blew off a local Cincinnati television reporter who asked the president about his “kill list.”
On Wednesday, however, CNN’s Jessica Yellin managed to get Obama to open up, just a little, about his criteria for approving drone attacks. His comments may have been the president’s most extensive so far on robot warfare. They were also total baloney, outside experts say.
“It has to be a target that is authorised by our laws.”
“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative.”
“It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”
“We’ve got to make sure that in whatever operations we conduct, we are very careful about avoiding civilian casualties.”
“That while there is a legal justification for us to try and stop [American citizens] from carrying out plots … they are subject to the protections of the Constitution and due process.”
At least two of those five points appear to be half-truths at best. In both Yemen and Pakistan, the CIA is allowed to launch a strike based on the target’s “signature” — that is, whether he appears to look and act like a terrorist. As senior U.S. officials have repeatedly confirmed, intelligence analysts don’t even have to know the target’s name, let alone whether he’s planning to attack the U.S. In some cases, merely being a military-aged male at the wrong place at the wrong time is enough to justify your death.
“What I found most striking was his claim that legitimate targets are a ‘threat that is serious and not speculative,’ and engaged in ‘some operational plot against the United States,’ That is simply not true,” emails the Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko, who has tracked the drone war as closely as any outside analyst. [Continue reading…]
Costas Lapavitsas writes: Last week I was in Athens and took the metro to Syntagma Square. Like many northern Greeks, I have mixed feelings towards the capital. Northerners do not like to admit it, but we secretly enjoy the smell of jasmine – the true scent of Athens. But this time the air smelt of cordite.
Syntagma was abnormally quiet: shops shut, people halfheartedly shopping, riot police everywhere. The atmosphere crackled with the expectation of something sinister about to happen. And lo, in Monastiraki Square, afew hundred yards away, agroup of young men attacked a shop owner; just another violent episode in a city resembling a tinderbox.
The prime culprit for the disintegrating social order is the economic policy emanating from Brussels and Berlin. In 2009-10 the troika – the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank – judged that Greece had a problem of public deficits and debts due to profligacy, corruption and tax avoidance. They offered bailout loans in exchange for cuts to public spending, higher taxes, and reduced wages. Successive Greek governments have imposed austerity with alacrity, delivering a vast contraction of the deficit – perhaps even 8% of GDP by the end of 2012.
The trouble was that austerity could not have its usual accompaniment of currency devaluation, since the country remained a member of the European monetary union. The pressure of adjustment thus turned inward, causing an unprecedented depression – GDP has contracted by 4.5% in 2010, 7% in 2011 and probably 7% in 2012. Unemployment has rocketed, and a humanitarian crisis has emerged in urban centres. The NGO Médecins du Monde estimates that for the past several months the majority of its clients have been destitute Greeks rather than immigrants. Its medicine stockpile is currently running very low, and its managers have no idea how they will cope this winter.
But cope they must, because the troika is now demanding a further bout of austerity – cuts of nearly €12bn to create a large primary budget surplus and to start reducing Greek public debt by 2014. Desperate to remain in the EMU, the Greek government has agreed to slash pensions, retirement lump sums, public sector wages, social expenditure and military spending. The ensuing reduction in aggregate demand means recession will continue next year, with official unemployment perhaps even reaching 30%. In 2013 there will be people in Athens who will not have enough to eat. The tragedy is that the pain will be for nothing as the fresh austerity will probably fail. The troika is yet again underestimating the depth of the oncoming recession, and thus the loss of revenue and the higher unemployment expenditure. Greek public debt, meanwhile, remains completely unsustainable. It is very likely that further austerity measures will be demanded in 2013 and beyond. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: A Pakistani judge on Friday granted bail to a teenage Christian girl accused of burning a religious textbook, offering a potential breakthrough in a prominent case that has renewed scrutiny of the country’s blasphemy laws.
After a lengthy court hearing that saw heated arguments, Justice Muhammad Azam Khan ordered that 14-year-old Rimsha Masih be released on bail of one million rupees, or $10,500.
William Dalrymple writes: It is rare these days to read any good news coming out of Pakistan. It is rarer still to read good news concerning matters of religion. However, in one week two stories seem to show that Pakistan is for once bringing the force of law to bear on those who abuse religion to provoke violence against minorities.
Last Sunday Mohammed Khalid Chisti, the mullah who had accused a 14-year-old Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, of blasphemy, was himself arrested and charged with the same law. The turnaround took place after the muezzin of his mosque gave evidence that he had framed the girl and falsified evidence. More remarkable still, the far-from- moderate All Pakistan Ulema Council came to Rimsha’s defence, calling her “a daughter of the nation” and denouncing Chisthi: “Our heads are bowed with shame for what he did.”
On Tuesday an even more unexpected event took place. Malik Ishaq, the leader of the banned Sunni terrorist group Lashkar–e-Jhangvi, which is accused of killing hundreds of Shias, was arrested on his return from a fund-raising trip to Saudi Arabia. Lashkar operates quite openly in Lahore despite being officially banned; yet on this occasion Ishaq was immediately brought to court. There he was accused of involvement in more than 40 cases in which 70 people have been killed. He now resides in Kot Lakhpat jail on 14-day judicial remand.
When Pakistan was created in 1947 as a homeland for Indian Muslims, its clean-shaven, tweed-jacketed, spats-wearing and pork-eating founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, made sure the constitution of his new country provided the right for all its citizens to profess, practise and propagate their religion: “You may belong to any religion, caste or creed,” he said in his first address to the constituent assembly of Pakistan on August 11 1947. “That has nothing to do with the business of the state. In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims – not in a religious sense, for that is the personal faith of an individual – but in the political sense as citizens of one state.”
It was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who started the rot. In 1974 he bowed to pressure from the religious right and had the country’s small Ahmedi minority declared non-Muslim. The situation became worse still in the 1980s with the military coup of General Zia. Zia was responsible for initiating the fatal alliance between the conservative military and the equally reactionary mullahs that led to the use of Islamic radicals as part of state policy. At the same time Zia started tinkering with the law. He introduced the Islamic punishment of amputation for theft, and established the Hudood ordinances of sharia law, which asserted that the evidence of one man was equal to that of two women, and made any sex outside marriage a punishable offence for women. Rape was to be punished with the public flogging of the female victim as well as the perpetrator. [Continue reading…]
Christopher Helman writes: The idea that Saudi Arabia could become an oil importer by 2030 is laughable. But that’s the scenario outlined in a report this week by Citigroup analyst Heidy Rehman. Looking at the Kingdom’s growth in power demand (much of which is generated by burning oil), Saudi Arabia’s domestic demand is on track to suck up ever more of its oil production to the point that there’s nothing left for export.
That sounds hard to believe given that the Kingdom produced 9.9 million bpd last month, the most in the world, and more than 10% of global demand. But developing countries usually grow electricity demand faster than population growth, and in Saudi Arabia air conditioning is not an option. Compounding the problem, writes Rehman is that Saudi power generators only pay $5 to $15 per barrel for the oil they burn.
To assuage civic unrest in the wake of the Arab Spring, Saudi King Abdullah has granted his 30 million subjects a host of new social handouts. He’s not about to yank subsidized electricity or gasoline now — but eventually it will probably have to happen.
It’s unlikely that by the time the Saudis need to import oil that there would be enough available on global markets to meet their needs. What’s more, considering that the $600 billion Saudi economy is based almost entirely on energy exports, if the Kingdom were to be able to afford to buy oil from the rest of the world it would have to sufficiently diversify to the point that it made enough other products for export that it could offset its oil import bill. This is highly unlikely for a country with no tradition of entrepreneurship, few rights for women and a reliance on indentured laborers brought in from the likes of Sri Lanka and Malaysia to do any kind of manual labor.
Rather if the Saudis are going to be able to make their energy ends meet in the decades to come they will have to rely on gleaning a different kind of energy out of the desert: solar power. [Continue reading…]
Marsha B Cohen writes: “It is unfortunate that the entire Democratic Party has embraced President Obama’s shameful refusal to acknowledge that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital,” declared Mitt Romney on September 4.
The deletion of a single sentence about Jerusalem in the Democratic platform, which reportedly had been vetted by officials from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), generated hysterical headlines that went viral and ricocheted throughout cyberspace, arousing panic among Democrats and glee among Republicans. (The Democrats reinserted the language on September 5 after President Obama “intervened directly.“)
Ironically, affirming Jerusalem’s status as the capital of Israel and the importance of relocating the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been a largely Democratic strategy for nearly four decades, particularly when there has been an incumbent Republican president in the White House. Republicans latch on to it whenever a Democratic president is running for re-election.
We recognize and support the established status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, with free access to all its holy places provided to all faiths. As a symbol of this stand, the U.S. Embassy should be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
This stance was reiterated in the 1980 and 1984 platforms. In 1983, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called for relocating of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, in a bill co-sponsored by fifty senators. When State Department officials in the Reagan administration objected that moving the Embassy would strain diplomatic ties with Arab countries, Moynihan did not press for a vote. No mention of Jerusalem whatsoever was made in the Democratic platform in 1988, in the wake of Secretary of State George Shultz’s sharp criticism of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis for suggesting that, if elected President, he would consider transferring the Embassy to Jerusalem. “It’s shocking that anybody would make such a proposal,” the Reagan administration’s chief spokesman on foreign policy told NBC’s Today show. Since Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights “are regarded as occupied territory” and are “subject to negotiations” according to Shultz, who deemed any notion of moving the Embassy a “mistake.” [Continue reading…]
And so it proved to be, as America entered the war and led the world to victory over fascism, then created a new world order that promoted the rule of law and parliamentary institutions as the basis of global governance. Americans altered the human condition with a dazzling array of new technologies, fostered global opening and reform, contained and outlasted communism, and saw the apparent triumph of democratic ideals over their alternatives. But that era came to an end in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the establishment of the United States as the only global power.
Americans then indulged in a dozen intercalary years of narcissistic confusion. We celebrated our unrivaled military power and proclaimed ourselves “the indispensable nation,” but failed to define a coherent vision of a post-Cold War order or an inspiring role for our country within it. These essential tasks were deferred to the 21st Century, which finally began eleven years ago, with the shock and awe of 9/11. In the panic and rage of that moment, we made the choices about our world role we had earlier declined to make.
Since 9/11, Americans have chosen to stake our domestic tranquility on our ability – under our commander-in-chief – to rule the world by force of arms rather than to lead, as we had in the past, by the force of our example or our arguments. And we appear to have decided in the process that it is necessary to destroy our civil liberties in order to save them and that abandoning the checks and balances of our Constitution will make us more secure. Meanwhile, our military-industrial complex and its flourishing antiterrorist sidekick have been working hard to invent a credible existential challenge to match that of the Cold War. This has produced constantly escalating spending on military and antiterrorist projects, but it has not overcome the reality that Americans now face no threat from abroad comparable to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the USSR. The only real menace to our freedoms is our own willingness to supplant the rule of law with ever more elements of a garrison state.
The so-called “global war on terror” or “militant Islam,” as so many now openly describe it, has become an endless run in a military squirrel cage that is generating no light but a lot of future anti-American terrorism. It turns out that all that is required to be hated is to do hateful things. Ironically, as we “search abroad for monsters to destroy,” we are creating them – transforming our foreign detractors into terrorists, multiplying their numbers, intensifying their militancy, and fortifying their hatred of us. The sons and brothers of those we have slain know where we are. They do not forget. No quarter is given in wars of religion. We are generating the very menace that entered our imaginations on 9/11. [Continue reading…]
Human Rights Watch: The United States government during the Bush administration tortured opponents of Muammar Gaddafi, then transferred them to mistreatment in Libya, according to accounts by former detainees and recently uncovered CIA and UK Secret Service documents, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. One former detainee alleged he was waterboarded and another described a similar form of water torture, contradicting claims by Bush administration officials that only three men in US custody had been waterboarded.
The 154-page report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya,” is based on interviews conducted in Libya with 14 former detainees, most of whom belonged to an armed Islamist group that had worked to overthrow Gaddafi for 20 years. Many members of the group, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), joined the NATO-backed anti-Gaddafi rebels in the 2011 conflict. Some of those who were rendered and allegedly tortured in US custody now hold key leadership and political positions in the country.
“Not only did the US deliver Gaddafi his enemies on a silver platter but it seems the CIA tortured many of them first,” said Laura Pitter, counterterrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “The scope of Bush administration abuse appears far broader than previously acknowledged and underscores the importance of opening up a full-scale inquiry into what happened.”
The report is also based on documents – some of which are being made public for the first time – that Human Rights Watch found abandoned, on September 3, 2011, in the offices of former Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa after Tripoli fell to rebel forces.
The interviews and documents establish that, following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the US, with aid from the United Kingdom (UK) and countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, arrested and held without charge a number of LIFG members living outside Libya, and eventually rendered them to the Libyan government.
The report also describes serious abuses that five of the former LIFG members said they experienced at two US-run detention facilities in Afghanistan, most likely operated by the CIA. They include new allegations of waterboarding and other water torture. The details are consistent with the few other first-hand accounts about the same US-run facilities.
Other abuses reported by these former detainees include being chained to walls naked –sometimes while diapered – in pitch black, windowless cells, for weeks or months; restrained in painful stress positions for long periods, forced into cramped spaces; beaten and slammed into walls; kept indoors for nearly five months without the ability to bathe; and denied sleep by continuous, very loud Western music.
“I spent three months getting interrogated heavily during the first period and they gave me a different type of torture every day. Sometimes they used water, sometimes not.… Sometimes they stripped me naked and sometimes they left me clothed,” said Khalid al-Sharif, who asserted he was held for two years in two different US-run detention centers believed to be operated by the CIA in Afghanistan. Al-Sharif is now head of the Libyan National Guard. One of his responsibilities is providing security for facilities holding Libya’s high-value detainees.
The Libyan detainee accounts in the Human Rights Watch report had previously gone largely undocumented because most of those returned to Libya were locked up in Libyan prisons until last year, when Libya’s civil unrest led to their release. And the US government has been unwilling to make public the details about its secret CIA detention facilities. The accounts of former detainees, the CIA documents found in Libya, and some declassified US government memos have shed new light on US detention practices under the Bush administration but also highlighted the vast amount of information that still remains secret.
Despite overwhelming evidence of numerous and systematic abuses of detainees in US custody since the September 11 attacks, the US has yet to hold a single senior official accountable. Only a few low-ranking enlisted military personnel have been punished.
On August 30, 2012, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the only criminal investigation the Department of Justice had undertaken into alleged abuses in CIA custody, headed by special prosecutor John Durham, would be closed without anyone being criminally charged. Holder had already narrowed the scope of Durham’s investigation on June 30, 2011, limiting it from the original investigation into the 101 people believed to have been in CIA custody to the cases of only two individuals.
In both cases, the detainees had died, one in Afghanistan and another in Iraq. The inquiry was also limited in that it looked only into abuses that went beyond what the Bush administration had authorized. It could not cover acts of torture, such as waterboarding, and other ill-treatment that Bush administration lawyers had approved, even if the acts violated domestic and international law.
“The stories of the Libyans held by the US and then sent to Libya make clear that detainee abuse, including mistreatment not necessarily specifically authorized by Bush administration officials, was far-reaching,” Pitter said. “The closure of the Durham investigation, without any charges, sends a message that abuse like that suffered by the Libyan detainees will continue to be tolerated.”
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) has spent three years researching the CIA’s detention and interrogation program and reportedly has completed a report. Human Rights Watch called on the SSCI to promptly release its report with as few redactions as possible, and to recommend that an independent, non-partisan commission investigate all aspects of US policy relating to detainee treatment.
“The US government continues to demand, and rightly so, that countries from Libya to Syria to Bahrain hold accountable officials responsible for serious human rights abuses, including torture,” Pitter said. “Those calls would carry a lot more weight if it wasn’t simultaneously shielding former US officials who authorized torture from any form of accountability.”
Since the fall of the Gaddafi government, US diplomats and members of Congress have met with some of the former CIA prisoners now in Libya, and the US has supported efforts by the Libyan government and civil society to overcome the legacy of their country’s authoritarian past. Human Rights Watch urged the US government to acknowledge its own past role in abuses and in helping Gaddafi round up his exiled opponents, to provide redress to the victims, and to prosecute those responsible for their alleged torture in US custody.
One previously reported case for which Human Rights Watch uncovered some new information is that of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi. The Bush administration had helped to justify the 2003 Iraq invasion by relying on statements that al-Libi made during his abuse and mistreatment in CIA custody. The CIA has acknowledged that these statements were unreliable. Years later, the US rendered al-Libi to Libya, where he died in prison in May 2009. Accounts from al-Libi’s fellow detainees in Afghanistan and Libya, information from his family, and photos seen by Human Rights Watch apparently taken of him the day he died, provide insight into his treatment and death, which Libyan authorities claim was a suicide.
Scores of the documents that Human Rights Watch uncovered in Libya also show a high level of cooperation between the Gaddafi government in Libya and US and the UK in the renditions discussed in the report.
The US played the most extensive role in the renditions back to Libya. But other countries, notably the UK, were also involved, even though these governments knew and recognized that torture was common during Gaddafi’s rule. Countries linked to the accounts about renditions include: Afghanistan, Chad, China and Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, and the UK. Interviewees alleged that personnel in some of these countries also abused them prior to transferring them back to Libya.
International law binding on the US and other countries prohibits torture and other ill-treatment in all circumstances, and forbids transferring people to countries in which they face a serious risk of torture or persecution.
“The involvement of many countries in the abuse of Gaddafi’s enemies suggests that the tentacles of the US detention and interrogation program reached far beyond what was previously known,” Pitter said. “The US and other governments that assisted in detainee abuse should offer a full accounting of their role.”
Tony Karon writes: After a summer of stoking media speculation that Israel would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before Americans go to the polls in November, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak appear to be dialing things down. Netanyahu on Monday repeated his new message that war can be avoided, at least for now, if the U.S. is willing to publicly declare a clear “red line” that, if crossed by Iran, would trigger a U.S. military response. Since President Barack Obama last spring clearly stated that he would order military action if Iran moved to build a nuclear weapon, there would be nothing new in reiterating such a position — except, perhaps, that it could be spun, together with a series of largely symbolic gestures reportedly being weighed by the Obama Administration to placate the Israelis, as a enough of a concession to allow Netanyahu and Barak to clamber down from the limb on which their war talk has left them. It has been nothing short of astonishing, in fact, how isolated on the Iran issue Israel’s saber-rattlers-in-chief have become over the summer, not least among Israel’s own defense and security establishment. [Update: Netanyahu’s troubles in sustaining his case for war appeared to deepen, Wednesday, with reports that he’d abruptly canceled a meeting of his security cabinet after some of the contents of its briefings by Israeli intelligence agencies were leaked to the Israeli media, which reported that Israeli intelligence saw no cause for alarm beyond ongoing concern over the findings of last week’s IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear work — a conclusion that undermined the Prime Minister’s more alarmist assessments of Iranian progress.]
Netanyahu and Barak’s bellicosity has ignited a remarkable degree of opposition among Israel’s defense and security chiefs, who are reportedly unanimous in opposing an attack on Iran at this stage. Not only that, the public outpouring of opposition to a military strike among recently retired senior Israeli military men and security chiefs has included an unprecedented barrage of attacks on the strategic competence and even the mental stability of Netanyahu and Barak. Describing a recent public interview given by Gen. Uri Sagi, a respected senior IDF officer who served under Barak, analyst Shai Feldman notes:
“Sagi questioned, for the first time publicly, whether Israel can rely on the judgment and mental stability of its current leaders to guide it in time of war. Listing a number of past strategic errors made by Barak and hinting at Netanyahu’s ascribed tendency to traverse rapidly between euphoria and panic, Sagi expressed grave doubts whether Israel’s current leaders can take the pressures and stress entailed in managing a major military confrontation.”
Former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin, in April, accused Netanyahu and Barak of harboring “messianic feelings,” and questioned their competence to lead Israel into a confrontation. Even opposition leader Shaul Mofaz, the former military chief of staff who served in a unity government as Netanyahu’s deputy from May to July and who opposes attacking Iran, told Army Radio that he found Netanyahu “confused, stressed out and unfocused” when the two men met last week. [Continue reading…]
VOA reports: The United Nations is calling for urgent action to reduce the growing health and environmental hazards from exposure to chemical substances. A new study – “Global Chemicals Outlook” – by the U.N. Environment Program [UNEP] finds sound management of chemicals could save millions of lives and provide an economic bonanza to nations worldwide.
The report presents a stark view of a world that is overwhelmed by increased volumes of chemicals. The most frightening aspect of this scenario is that very little is known about the estimated 143,000 chemicals being produced.
The U.N. Environment Program says only a fraction of these chemicals have been evaluated to determine their effects on human health and the environment. Chemicals are pervasive in every aspect of life. The report says they are used in agriculture, electronics and mining. They are found in products such as paints, adhesives, textiles and toys for children.
The report says death and disability rates from the unsafe use of chemical products are high. For example, it notes that poisonings from industrial and agricultural chemicals are among the top five leading causes of death worldwide, contributing to more than 1 million deaths annually.
The GCO report states: Despite ubiquitous exposure to chemicals in both developed and developing nations, little is known about the total disease burden attributable to chemicals. In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that globally, 4.9 million deaths (8.3% of total) and 86 million Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) (5.7% of total) were attributable to environmental exposure and management of selected chemicals in 2004 for which data were available. This figure includes indoor smoke from solid fuel use, outdoor air pollution and second-hand smoke, with 2.0, 1.2 and 0.6 million deaths/year. These are followed by occupational particulates, chemicals involved in acute poisonings, and pesticides involved in self-poisonings, with 375,000, 240,000 and 186,000 deaths/year respectively.
Estimates for selected chemicals (including pesticides) involved in unintentional acute and occupational poisonings, a limited number of occupational carcinogens and particulates and lead, correspond to a total of 964,000 deaths and 20,986,153 DALYs, corresponding to 1.6% of the total deaths and 1.4% of the total burden of disease worldwide. To compare, among the global top ten leading causes of death in 2004, HIV/AIDS caused 2 million deaths, tuberculosis caused 1.5 million deaths, road traffic accidents caused 1.27 million deaths, and malaria caused 0.9 million deaths (WHO, 2008).
This global estimate is an underestimate of the real burden attributable to chemicals. Only a small number of chemicals were included in the WHO analysis due to limitations in data availability. Critical chemicals not incorporated in the analysis due to data gaps include mercury, dioxins, organic chlorinated solvents, PCBs, and chronic pesticide exposures as well as health impacts from exposure to local toxic waste sites.
Glenn Greenwald describes how CNN International appears to have engaged in self-censorship in order to protect Bahrain’s repressive regime.
CNN’s total cost for the documentary, ultimately titled “iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring”, was in excess of $100,000, an unusually high amount for a one-hour program of this type. The portion Lyon and her team produced on Bahrain ended up as a 13-minute segment in the documentary. That segment, which as of now is available on YouTube, is a hard-hitting and unflinching piece of reporting that depicts the regime in a very negative light.
Amber Lyon, former CNN report Amber Lyon on CNN, commenting on the March 2011 repression in Bahrain
In the segment, Lyon interviewed activists as they explicitly described their torture at the hands of government forces, while family members recounted their relatives’ abrupt disappearances. She spoke with government officials justifying the imprisonment of activists. And the segment featured harrowing video footage of regime forces shooting unarmed demonstrators, along with the mass arrests of peaceful protesters. In sum, the early 2011 CNN segment on Bahrain presented one of the starkest reports to date of the brutal repression embraced by the US-backed regime.
On 19 June 2011 at 8pm, CNN’s domestic outlet in the US aired “iRevolution” for the first and only time. The program received prestigious journalism awards, including a 2012 Gold Medal from New York Festival’s Best TV and Films. Lyon, along with her segment producer Taryn Fixel, were named as finalists for the 2011 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. A Facebook page created by Bahraini activists, entitled “Thank you Amber Lyon, CNN reporter | From people of Bahrain”, received more than 8,000 “likes”.
Despite these accolades, and despite the dangers their own journalists and their sources endured to produce it, CNN International (CNNi) never broadcast the documentary. Even in the face of numerous inquiries and complaints from their own employees inside CNN, it continued to refuse to broadcast the program or even provide any explanation for the decision. To date, this documentary has never aired on CNNi.
Glenn Greenwald writes: For several decades, protection of whistleblowers has been a core political value for Democrats, at least for progressives. Daniel Ellsberg has long been viewed by liberals as an American hero for his disclosure of the top secret Pentagon Papers. In 2008, candidate Obama hailed whistleblowing as “acts of courage and patriotism”, which “should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration”.
President Obama, however, has waged the most aggressive and vindictive assault on whistleblowers of any president in American history, as even political magazines generally supportive of him have recognized and condemned. One might think that, as the party’s faithful gather to celebrate the greatness of this leader, this fact would be a minor problem, a source of some tension between Obama and his hardest-core supporters, perhaps even some embarrassment. One would be wrong.
Far from shying away from this record of persecuting whistleblowers, the Obama campaign is proudly boasting of it. A so-called “Truth Team” of the Obama/Biden 2012 campaign issued a document responding to allegations that the Obama White House has leaked classified information in order to glorify the president: [Continue reading…]
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