Really? We are to believe, with Margaret Thatcher, that an economic system with endlessly repeated cycles, costly bailouts for financiers and now austerity for most people is the best human beings can do? Capitalism’s recurring tendencies toward extreme and deepening inequalities of income, wealth, and political and cultural power require resignation and acceptance – because there is no alternative?
I understand why such a system’s leaders would like us to believe in Tina. But why would others?
Of course, alternatives exist; they always do. Every society chooses – consciously or not, democratically or not – among alternative ways to organize the production and distribution of the goods and services that make individual and social life possible.
Modern societies have mostly chosen a capitalist organization of production. In capitalism, private owners establish enterprises and select their directors who decide what, how and where to produce and what to do with the net revenues from selling the output. This small handful of people makes all those economic decisions for the majority of people – who do most of the actual productive work. The majority must accept and live with the results of all the directorial decisions made by the major shareholders and the boards of directors they select. This latter also select their own replacements.
Capitalism thus entails and reproduces a highly undemocratic organization of production inside enterprises. Tina believers insist that no alternatives to such capitalist organizations of production exist or could work nearly so well, in terms of outputs, efficiency, and labor processes. The falsity of that claim is easily shown. Indeed, I was shown it a few weeks ago and would like to sketch it for you here. [Continue reading…]
Will Hutton writes: A month’s rain fell in a day last week in parts of Britain. There were 140 flood warnings in the north of England, rain forcing the evacuation of Croston and Darwen in Lancashire; elsewhere, it washed out the Isle of Wight festival. Indeed, rainfall over the last three months has broken new records – following two years in which less rain had fallen than at any time since the 1920s.
This is part of a wider pattern. It is not just that world temperatures are on average steadily rising, the weather everywhere is becoming more extreme. Eleven of the last 12 years have been the hottest on record, and the growing volatility in our weather is linked to global warming. As the earth warms, the relationships between ocean currents, the ice caps, atmospheric pressure and the jet stream become more turbulent, and the weather turns more unpredictable.
Twenty years ago these trends, already visible but less marked, prompted the first earth summit in Rio. The second one closed on Friday night with a political declaration as long as it was vapid. There were plenty of warm words and reaffirmations of intent – but nothing that might address the intense pressure on the natural environment.
There was, for example, no deterrent to the burning of fossil fuels or incentive to make renewable ones more economically attractive. Targets for sustainable development? Forget them. And so it went on — a non-event that hardly got reported.
There was the usual cast of suspects. China and India were determined that action on carbon emissions must be undertaken by the west and not by them, so creating political deadlock. American oil, car and airline companies lobby intensely to stop any tax being levied on oil and gas, while global banks lobby no less furiously against a financial transactions tax whose proceeds might be used to alleviate the impact of climate change on those countries and regions most badly affected – usually the very poorest.
Climate change is not just about life on earth tomorrow: it is about justice today. But lobbying and political intransigence are much easier to achieve when there is no intellectual consensus – and one of the dramatic changes since 1992 is the worldwide growth of climate change scepticism. [Continue reading…]
Jillian York writes: Each time I log in to Facebook, I am presented with the option of visiting the profiles of friends currently in prison. These friends are not incarcerated in my country, the United States, nor are their “crimes” violent or drug-related. All are, rather, victims of political repression, imprisoned in Tehran and Damascus, or in hiding somewhere in Bahrain.
When Hossein Derakhshan (or “Hoder” as he is known to friends) was arrested back in 2009, he was the first blogger I’d met in person to fall victim to such a fate. We’d met the previous summer, at a Global Voices conference in Budapest, to the sound of dance music on a rooftop well past midnight. He was charismatic, and as I learned from many of his friends, conflicted. Just one year later, shortly after his ill-fated return to Iran, he would be arrested and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Although our meeting had been brief, Hoder’s arrest impacted me pretty intensely. Seeing him largely ignored in the US press – despite previous praise as the “Blogfather” of the Iranian blogosphere – spurred me to speak up; I haven’t been silent since.
It was only a month after Hoder’s arrest that, along with some of the Arab world’s most prominent and respected bloggers, I was welcomed to Beirut for the second “Arabloggers” workshop for my work with Global Voices. It was there that, for the second time, I met Ali Abdulemam, the Bahraini blogger who by that point was well-known – at least in our blogger circles – for the online platform he had founded, Bahrain Online.
Like Hoder, perhaps Ali didn’t realise how brave his actions were. It was only a few months later that Bahrain began to crack down on dissidents. In August, Ali’s home was raided, he and his team arrested and charged with “inciting hatred of the government”. Though they were released not long after, Ali was arrested again the next month and charged with “spreading false information”. While in detention, he was fired from his job, tortured and reportedly denied legal counsel. He was free long enough to see the beginning of Bahrain’s uprising, but by the time the government once again began to crack down on bloggers and activists, he had disappeared.
In June 2011, Ali was tried by a military court in absentia and sentenced to 15 years in prison for allegedly plotting an anti-government coup. He remains in hiding. More recently, my good friend Razan Ghazzawi spent time in prison for her brave work with the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression, along with a number of her colleagues. Though she has since been released, Razan still faces a trial; her fate remains unknown.
Ali, Razan and Hoder are but three examples illustrating the repression that bloggers face throughout the Middle East and, increasingly, many countries across the globe. From Iran to China, Vietnam and back to Tunisia, the year following the “Arab Spring” and a series of global popular movements has resulted in crackdowns on expression, showing just how terrified governments have become of the voice accorded their citizens via the internet.
TPM Muckraker reports: In the official view of the Obama administration, it’s totally possible that the drone that killed Anwar al-Awlaki was owned and operated by the Yemen government.
As absurd as it might sound, that’s the possibility the Justice Department is using as one of its justifications for withholding documents related to the targeted killing of U.S. citizens and individuals alleged affiliated with al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The justification comes in a briefing filed just before a midnight deadline in response to a lawsuit filed by The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the government, that alleges they improperly withheld documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
The federal government argues that it has never officially acknowledged the existence of a drone program, claiming that recent public nods by high-ranking administration officials to a targeted killing program do not amount to disclosure about particular operations.
“For example, whether or not the United States government conducted the particular operations that led to the deaths of Anwar al-Aulaki and the other individuals named in the FOIA requests remains classified,” the government writes.
“Likewise, whether or not the CIA has the authority to be, or is in fact, directly involved in targeted lethal operations remains classified. And that is so notwithstanding the unsourced, unofficial statements and media reports that plaintiffs have identified. None of those statements or reports constitutes an official disclosure that could vitiate agencies’ ability to safeguard the classified and other statutorily protected information at issue here, and none eliminates the national security harms that could result from disclosure of such information,” they claim.
Last month, a “senior administration official” said the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under President Obama is in the “single digits.” But last year “U.S. officials” said drones in Pakistan killed about 30 civilians in just a yearlong stretch under Obama.
Both claims can’t be true.
A centerpiece of President Obama’s national security strategy, drones strikes in Pakistan are credited by the administration with crippling Al Qaeda but criticized by human rights groups and others for being conducted in secret and killing civilians. The underlying facts are often in dispute and claims about how many people died and who they were vary widely.
So we decided to narrow it down to just one issue: have the administration’s own claims been consistent?
We collected claims by the administration about deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and compared each one not to local reports but rather to other administration claims. The numbers sometimes do not add up. (Check out our interactive graphic to explore the claims.)
Even setting aside the discrepancy between official and outside estimates of civilian deaths, our analysis shows that the administration’s own figures quoted over the years raise questions about their credibility.
There have been 307 American drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, according to a New America Foundation count. Just 44 occurred during the Bush administration. President Obama has greatly expanded the use of drones to attack suspected members of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban, and other groups in Pakistan’s remote northwest region.
Obama officials generally do not comment by name on the drone strikes in Pakistan, but they frequently talk about it to reporters (including us) on condition of anonymity. Often those anonymously sourced comments have come in response to outside tallies of civilian deaths from drone attacks, which are generally much higher than the administration’s own figures.
The outright contradiction we noted above comes from two claims made about a year apart:
* April 22, 2011 McClatchy reports that U.S. officials claim “about 30” civilians died in the year between August 2009 and August 2010.
* May 29, 2012 The New York Times reports that, according to a senior Obama administration official, the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under president Obama is in the “single digits.”
As we also show in our interactive graphic, other anonymous administration claims about civilian deaths are possible but imply conclusions that seem improbable.
Consider:
* April 26, 2010 The Washington Post quotes an “internal CIA accounting” saying that “just over 20 civilians” have been killed by drones in Pakistan since January 2009.
* Aug. 11, 2011 The New York Times reports that CIA officers claim zero civilians were killed since May 2010
* Aug. 12, 2011 CNN quoted a U.S. official saying there were 50 civilians killed over the years in drone strikes in Pakistan.
If this set of claims is assumed to be accurate, it suggests that the majority of the 50 total civilian deaths occurred during the Bush administration 2014 when the drone program was still in its infancy. As we’ve noted, in the entire Bush administration, there were 44 strikes. In the Obama administration through Aug. 12, 2011, there were 222. So according to this set of claims more civilians died in just 44 strikes under Bush than did in 222 strikes under Obama. (Again, the graphic is helpful to assess the administration assertions.)
Consider also these three claims, which imply two lengthy periods when zero or almost zero civilians were killed in drone strikes:
* September 10, 2010 Newsweek quotes a government estimate that “about 30” civilians were killed since the beginning of 2008.
* April 22, 2011 McClatchy reports that U.S. officials claim “about 30” civilians died in the year between August 2009 and August 2010.
* July 15, 2011 Reuters quotes a source familiar with the drone program as saying “about 30” civilians were killed since July 2008.
It’s possible that all these claims are true. But if they are, it implies that the government believes there were zero or almost zero civilian deaths between the beginning of 2008 and August 2009, and then again zero deaths between August 2010 and July 2011. Those periods comprise a total of 182 strikes.
The administration has rejected in the strongest terms outside claims of a high civilian toll from the drone attacks.
Those outside estimates also vary widely. A count by Bill Roggio, editor of the website the Long War Journal, which bases its estimates on news reports, puts the number of civilian killed in Pakistan at 138. The New America Foundation estimates that, based on press reports, between 293 and 471 civilians have been killed in the attacks. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which draws on a wider array of sources including researchers and lawyers in Pakistan, puts the number of civilians killed at between 482 and 832. The authors of the various estimates all emphasize that their counts are imperfect.
There are likely multiple reasons for the varying counts of civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan. The attacks are executed remotely in often inaccessible regions. And there’s the question of who U.S. officials are counting as civilians. A story last month in the New York Times reported that President Obama adopted a policy that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”
There are also ongoing debates in the humanitarian law community about who the U.S. may legitimately target with drone strikes and how the CIA is applying the principle of proportionality 2014 which holds that attacks that might cause civilian deaths must be proportional to the level of military advantage anticipated.
In a rare public comment on drone strikes, President Obama told an online town hall in January that the drones had not caused “a huge number of civilian casualties.”
When giving their own figures on civilian deaths, administration officials are often countering local reports. In March 2011, for example, Pakistanisincluding the country’s army chief accused a U.S. drone strike of hitting a peaceful meeting of tribal elders, killing around 40 people. An unnamed U.S. official rejected the accusations, telling the AP: “There’s every indication that this was a group of terrorists, not a charity car wash in the Pakistani hinterlands.”
Unnamed U.S. officials told the Los Angeles Times last year that “they are confident they know who has been killed because they watch each strike on video and gather intelligence in the aftermath, observing funerals for the dead and eavesdropping on conversations about the strikes.”
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said during a visit to Pakistan this month that there should be investigation of killings of civilians by drones and that victims should be compensated. The U.S. has given compensation to victims of airstrikes in Afghanistan but there are no reports of victims of drone strikes in Pakistan being compensated.
Since the various administration statements over the years were almost all quoted anonymously, it’s impossible to go back to the officials in question to ask them about contradictions.
Asked about the apparent contradictions, National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told ProPublica: “[W]e simply do not comment on alleged drone strikes.”
The Guardian reports: The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi has been declared Egypt’s first post-revolutionary president, bringing an end to days of feverish speculation amid increased divisions and polarisation.
Morsi won with 51% of the vote. Second-placed Ahmed Shafiq, Mubarak’s final prime minister, took 48%.
The incoming president assumes office after a turbulent few weeks that have left Egypt’s wrenching transition in disarray, with parliament being dissolved by the supreme court and a military-issued constitutional declaration that severely limits presidential powers.
Both sides quarrelled over tactics in the wake of the polls closing. The Muslim Brotherhood announced Morsi as the winner six hours after voting ended, having tabulated the results from the 13,000 poll stations.
The Shafiq campaign responded angrily, claiming its candidate was actually the one leading the race. The supreme council of the armed forces (Scaf), Egypt’s ruling military leadership, waded in, criticising the Brotherhood for its “unjustifiable” premature announcement.
Meanwhile, talk of backroom negotiations between the Muslim Brotherhood and Scaf was confirmed by the group’s deputy head, Khairat Al-Shater, as the two sides traded barbs over the country’s political future. The Muslim Brotherhood held a press conference on Friday in conjunction with liberal forces, during which it attempted to mollify its critics.
Morsi will have much to occupy his first few days of office, encumbered by the overreach of the generals and the divisive nature of Egyptian politics.
“The symbolism of a presidential election victory, particularly for Morsi, will be an achievement in and of itself,” said Mike Hanna, fellow at the Century foundation. “But after that initial euphoria has evaporated, he will be faced with difficult circumstances, a tired and impatient nation, and an ongoing power for political power.”
Hürriyet Daily News reports: A Turkish jet shot down by Syria on June 22 was done so without warning in international waters, Turkey has said, adding that it was consulting with NATO allies on a possible reaction.
According to sources, the discussions could involve invoking Article 4 of the alliance’s charter, which calls for consultations among member countries when the security of any parties is involved.
“Our plane was shot down in international airspace, 13 nautical miles from Syria,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told TRT television yesterday.
After a short, unintentional violation of Syrian airspace, the plane returned to Turkish airspace after being warned by its own radar that it strayed over the air border, the minister said, adding that Syria shot down the plane after it had returned to international airspace.
“The plane did not show any sign of hostility toward Syria and was shot down about 15 minutes after having momentarily violated Syrian airspace,” he said, adding that Syria was trying to link the two incidents.
Dismissing Syria’s allegations that it did not know the plane was Turkish, the minister said Turkey had intercepted radio communications from the Syria side suggesting that they knew it was a Turkish aircraft.
“We have both radar info and Syria’s radio communications,” Davutoğlu said, adding that there was no warning from Syria before the attack.
“The Syrians knew full well that it was a Turkish military plane and the nature of its mission,” he said.
“The aircraft did not have arms and was flying on a training mission to conduct a national radar system test for national security over recent [developments] along the Mediterranean coast,” he said, adding that it was alone, had no hidden identity and had no mission to gather any kind of information.
Noah Feldman writes: [T]he army represents the traditional power structure in Egypt, and the Brotherhood represents the will of the people as it would be defined in an ordinary democracy. Their clash is the real thing: a head-to-head confrontation between autocratic force and popular majoritarianism. Its resolution will determine, to a great extent, the future of democracy in the entire Arab world. It will determine once and for all whether the Arab Spring was real.
The struggle could be peacefully resolved in several ways — none very likely. The Brotherhood could fold, accepting the position of token power under the thumb of the military, as its Moroccan wing has done under King Muhammad VI. This would mean sacrificing credibility as well as ideology. If the Brotherhood were to accept such a wholly a subordinate position, it would squander its historic opportunity to marry religious legitimacy with constitutional democracy — its goal for the past two decades.
Alternatively, in a perfect Brotherhood world, the public would return to the streets in opposition to the army and the Supreme Council could back down, accepting the Brotherhood’s electoral victory in exchange for a promise to allow the military to keep its $1 billion-plus in annual US aid. The difficulty is that a substantial minority — 48 percent — of Egyptians voted for the military’s preferred presidential candidate, Ahmed Shafik.
Given the extent of its public support, there is little reason for the army to go gently. Nor will it be content to control a US-bankrolled military fiefdom — the generals know that over time, the Brotherhood will try to change the army by urging the promotion of younger, Islamist officers.
There is one model for compromise between the Brotherhood and the military, in which genuine power-sharing subsists over time: Turkey since the Justice and Development Party took power in 2002. The Turkish military has gradually lost its controlling place in government, a fact the Supreme Council will not ignore. But Turkey is comparatively rich, stable and happy — and that, too, is relevant.
Egyptians would also do well to recall the example of Algeria. After the first contemporary Arab democratic experiment took place there two decades ago, the military reacted to Islamist victory by reversing the electoral results and declaring martial law. The war that followed lasted for years. More than 100,000 people were killed in vicious guerilla fighting. Unless the Muslim Brotherhood and the military can find common ground soon, Egypt will be on a similar path.
The New York Times reports: The commission overseeing Egypt’s first competitive presidential election will declare an official winner on Sunday, the panel said Saturday, amid growing conviction that the announcement has become a bargaining chip in a negotiation for power between the ruling generals and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“As the beginning of a transition to democracy, it is a disaster,” said Omar Ashour, a political scientist at the University of Exeter and the Brookings Doha Center, who is here in Cairo. But, he added, the disaster began the day before the presidential runoff, when the military dissolved the Brotherhood-led Parliament and seized legislative power.
“The generals have their fingers on the reset button if they don’t like the outcome,” Mr. Ashour said. While the Brotherhood may have more legitimacy and the ability to bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, “the generals have the guns and tanks and armored vehicles,” he said. “We are playing realpolitik at the moment.”
Television talk shows have obsessed over fragmentary reports of conversations between Brotherhood leaders and the ruling generals, mainly a face-to-face meeting last weekend between the Brotherhood’s parliamentary leader, Saad el-Katatni, and Gen. Sami Hafez Enan. But a Brotherhood spokesman, Jihad el-Haddad, said Saturday that there had been no direct meetings since then, when the Brotherhood made its demands for the reinstatement of Parliament and the empowerment of an elected president.
What is more, he said, the Brotherhood agreed Friday that from now on any talks with the generals would be conducted by a new “national front” it had formed with more secular or liberal advocates of democracy. In so doing, the Brotherhood is acceding to arguments for greater collaboration and openness that have been for years advanced by its more liberal leaders.
Mr. Haddad also insisted that the announcement of a president was merely a first step toward the resolution of the standoff, adding that thousands of Brotherhood members and their allies have once again occupied Tahrir Square in Cairo. “The governing will within the national front is that there will be no meeting with SCAF unless there is an elected president,” he said, referring to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
Hürriyet Daily News reports: The Turkish government has refuted a statement from the Syrian Foreign Ministry that said Damascus acted in self-defense in shooting down a Turkish warplane on June 22, Turkish sources told the Hürriyet Daily News today.
“We have necessary information showing that the Turkish plane was shot at without any warning,” an official source said on condition of anonymity.
“We are 100 percent right and the act of Syrian regime is against all dynamics of international law,” Ömer Çelik, the deputy chairman in charge of foreign policy for the ruling Justi ce and Development Party (AK Parti), said on his Twitter account. “All data about the incident confirms that.”
A more detailed announcement about Turkey’s reaction is expected to be made tomorrow (Sunday) morning by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who has attended all three high-level security meetings and has been engaged in intense diplomacy since the incident took place.
One June 22, a Turkish F-4 Phantom reconnaissance plane which took off from an air base in the eastern province of Malatya, which also hosts the NATO-run missile shield radar, was shot down by Syria’s air defense system near the Syrian city of Latakia, which is close to the Russian naval base at Tartus.
The Syrian government said it shot down the plane in Syrian air space in self-defense before realizing that it was a Turkish plane. The aircraft’s two Turkish pilots are still missing.
Davutoğlu’s telephone diplomacy included the secretary general of the United Nations, the foreign ministers of all P5+1 countries (the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China and Germany), Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Iran (which also called Ankara to “express concern”), the foreign and security commissioner of the European Union and the secretary general of the Arab League, a diplomatic source told the Daily News.
In another important development, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has asked for appointments from the leaders of the other three main political parties in the Turkish Parliament on Sunday in order to explain the details of the incident and discuss the matter, the Prime Minister’s Office has announced.
This is an unusual move and has caused speculation about a possible parliamentary decision which is a requirement for any foreign military action according to the Turkish Constitution. “We are not considering a military action now,” a source told the Daily News. “But we want to inform the opposition and we want to keep all options open.”
Mosab Qasho writes: Anyone following the Palestinian struggle will have heard about Mahmoud Sarsak, the imprisoned Palestinian footballer who this week ended a hunger strike of over three months. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) have been publicizing their upcoming meeting with the head of the Israeli Kadima party, Shaul Mofaz, leaving a striking absence of any official comment on Sarsak’s situation.
It seems very bizarre that the PA and PLO ignored one of their national heroes, a rising star in the society’s most popular sport, who was on the brink of death. He was the easiest person to defend. He has never been involved in politics, is not a member of a political party, and had all the necessary Israel-issued permits. He was one of the youngest people to make the Palestinian National soccer team. Above all, he has not been charged or convicted by Israel of any wrongdoing, although Israel held him for three years.
Even considering the PA and the PLO more cynically, any politician could have seen a man in such a situation as a gift from the political gods. Imagine the affirmation they would have received if they negotiated his release. Imagine the photo-ops of officials visiting the soccer team Sarsak was supposed to join when he was seized by Israel. They could have even organized children’s soccer games in his honor. Yet these authorities didn’t not take advantage of this opportunity, neither for selfless nor for self-serving gains.
According to his mother, Sarsak remains in Marash clinic in the Ramle prison, refused access to a proper civilian hospital. He has been refused family visits, which was a condition that Israel had agreed to in previous deals with other hunger strikers. Instead, he was allowed a three-minute phone call with his mother. His eventual release was negotiated so late that Sarsak easily could have died before agreeing to anything.
Most importantly, if Israel decides that he incited other prisoners to go on hunger strike or does any political organizing after his release, he will be arrested again. Agreeing to these terms indicates that the lawyers who negotiated his release, who are paid by the Palestinian Authority, seem to be more interested ending the hunger strikes rather than ameliorating the prisoners’ conditions. Instead of fighting for the rights of their clients, these lawyers appeared to pressure them into accepting whatever deal Israel presents. [Continue reading…]
Nathan Thrall writes: Earlier this month, at a private meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his security advisers, a group of Middle East experts and former intelligence officers warned that a third Palestinian intifada was imminent. The immediate catalyst, they said, could be another mosque vandalized by Jewish settlers, like the one burned on Tuesday, or the construction of new settlement housing. Whatever the fuse, the underlying source of ferment in the West Bank is a consensus that the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, has reached a dead end.
Mr. Abbas’s political strategy was premised on the notion that security cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government would make Israel feel safer and remove its primary justification for continuing to occupy the West Bank, thereby clearing the way for a Palestinian state. Ironically, owing to the success of his efforts, many Israelis have had the luxury of forgetting that there is an occupation at all.
Thanks to the American- and European-financed peace that Mr. Abbas’s government has been keeping in the West Bank, Israelis have come to believe they can eat their cake and have it, too. A majority of citizens polled earlier this year said their state could remain Jewish and democratic without relinquishing any of the West Bank. Years of peace and quiet in Tel Aviv allowed hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets last summer to protest the high price of cottage cheese, rent and day care without uttering a word about Palestinians in the West Bank. The issue has ceased to be one of Israel’s primary security concerns. Mr. Netanyahu would have to be either politically suicidal or exceptionally forward-thinking to abandon a status quo with which a vast majority appears satisfied.
By contrast, Palestinians today see their leadership banging its head against a wall, hoping against reason that a bit more good behavior will bring about an independent state. As a result, longstanding debates over how to achieve national liberation — by comforting Israel or confronting it — have now been resolved. Palestinians of all political stripes are no longer arguing about whether to make Israel’s occupation more costly, but how. [Continue reading…]
The Los Angeles Times reports: For years, the idea seemed unthinkable, absurd. A secret U.S. detention center in a remote corner of Poland, where Al Qaeda suspects were brutally interrogated by the CIA? About as likely as “the Loch Ness monster,” is how one Pole described it recently.
That monster is now rearing its head.
Cloistered inside government offices, surrounded by classified documents, Polish prosecutors are building a case that could result in criminal charges against the nation’s former spy chief and even, some say, against former senior political leaders. Evidence that a foreign power was allowed to conduct illicit activities on Polish soil has deeply shaken many Poles’ faith in the United States and in Poland’s sense of itself as a successful democracy born from the ashes of the Cold War.
The prosecutors’ investigation centers on a Polish military garrison that allegedly hosted a CIA “black site” where foreign detainees were subjected to internationally condemned interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, during 2002 and 2003. The suspects — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks — had either been arrested or snatched under the United States’ “extraordinary rendition” program and questioned abroad to avoid American legal standards for interrogations, prosecutors say.
The allegations have already damaged the reputation of the country that Poles thank for helping them to cast off communist oppression. Many now angrily believe the U.S. took advantage of their gratitude, loyalty and eagerness to please by setting up a torture site that it would never have allowed within its own borders.
“It’s the kind of thing we expect from Soviet Russia. We remember the Soviet occupation; we remember the German occupation,” said attorney Mikolaj Pietrzak, who represents one of the Islamist men allegedly held and questioned in Poland. “The fact that this beacon of liberty which is America would allow this — it’s a great disappointment in the United States as the land of the free.” [Continue reading…]
ABC News reports: A Polish official says that prosecutors have a construction order that proves the CIA wanted a cage for terror suspects built at a secret ‘black site’ prison inside Poland.
Senator Jozef Pinior claims Krakow prosecutors have a document that shows a local contractor was asked to build a cage at Stare Kiekuty, a Polish army based used as a CIA prison for al Qaeda terror suspects in 2002 and 2003.
“In a state with rights,” Pinior told the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza, “people in prison are not kept in cages.” He said a cage was “non-standard equipment” for a prison, but standard “if torture was used there.”
Asked if he was sure the cage was for humans, he said, “What was it for? Exotic birds?” He said he has not seen the construction order, but that the Krakow prosecutor’s office, which is investigating the prison, has a copy of it.
This week Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the prosecutor’s office also allegedly has a signed order from Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, the then-head of Polish intelligence, authorizing the creation of the black site. A source told the paper that the agreement has a space intended for an American signature, but that the Americans did not sign the document “because they do not want to sign documents inconsistent with their own Constitution and international law.”
Hurriyet Daily News reports: Iran should be a part of the solution to the Syria crisis, international mediator Kofi Annan said June 22, a week before a planned crisis meeting, which is now in doubt due to Western objections to the Islamic Republic’s participation, is scheduled to take place.
The United States has vehemently opposed Russia’s demand for Iran’s involvement. Annan said the composition of the meeting is one of the sticking points that may not be resolved until next week. “I have made it quite clear that I believe Iran should be part of the solution,” Annan told reporters in Geneva. Iran, a powerful ally and neighbor of Syria, is the subject of a diplomatic standoff between the United States and Russia, which differ not only on the way forward on Syria but also on Iran’s nuclear program.
Annan also urged the international community to raise the level of pressure on both sides in the conflict.
“It’s time for countries of influence to raise the level of pressure on the parties on the ground and to persuade them to stop the killing and start the talking,” he said. Annan, who underlined the importance of making sure the crisis did not spread to neighbouring countries, also praised the work of the U.N.’s unarmed observers under Major General Robert Mood, head of the UN Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS).
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