Under The Same Sun

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June 30, 2004

Ann Coulter liked Clinton's Policies: "Everything Newt Gingrich sent up to him, he signed..."

Sometimes it takes Ann Coulter remind us about Clinton:

ANN COULTER: Yes, it‘s interesting that he [Clinton] alone among—he and Hillary actually have been very supportive of the war. ... Contrary to what the Clinton apologists kept saying, conservatives didn‘t particularly object to Clinton on policy. He was probably about the same as Bob Dole would have been.

Everything Newt Gingrich sent up to him, he signed after the ‘94 election. The problem wasn‘t policy. [Emphasis mine.]

Believe me, I understand that the Bush administration has been phenomenally horrible -- but do we have to forget everything about Clinton's policies to be able to acknowledge that? Here's a good timeline of the Iraq sanctions policy that may have killed half a million children or more mainly because of the way it was administered by the Clinton administration. (Clinton administration's policies towards AIDS drugs for poor nations, which became slightly less worse towards the end of Clinton's tenure thanks to a great campaign by U.S. activists, is another huge mark of shame for that administration.)

Posted by zeynep at 03:27 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Supreme Court Decisions are Generally Favorable to the Administration

The decisions of the Supreme Court regarding various cases involving Guantanamo detainees or American citizens designated as "enemy combatants" have been portrayed as victory agains the Bush administration's attempts to decimate civil liberties. Many commentators have praised the Court, one called it a "mortal blow to the President's vision of limitless power"-- and newspapers headlines ranged from "Wartime President Is Again Outflanked" to "Supreme Court Deals Blow to War on Terror"

My read is that's all wishful thinking by a press and a punditry that is now riding on a "Bush is sinking" meme, partly helped by Fahreneit 911's success.

Bushies may hope for just such a feeling in the country, come November. What better to get out their voters who appear to be somewhat upset about Iraq, the deficit, the economy...

It appears to me that most of the country is fairly decided on who they are going to vote for, with perhaps 10 percent up for grabs -- and that 10 percent will most likely be influenced by factors outside each of the campaigns such as the war in Iraq or the economy. In such an environment, the magic word is turnout. Remember, millions of eligible voters do not vote and it may well be that this election will go to the party whose base is most afraid of the other guy taking over. In such an environment, appearing to be on the verge of losing is not that bad.

Going back to the Supreme Court decision, I recognize that the some limitations have been finally placed on the royalist interpretation of the constitution but things are really bad if this is what we cheer now. The court allowed the category of enemy combatants, recognized that they may be held without charges, and also allowed that non-citizens could be held without charges in various sites of dubious jurisdictionality.

What's the victory? The detainees have some access to the courts to challenge their indefinite detention. Not full access, mind you, and they certainly do not have the usual rights of criminal defendants in regular federal courts. However, the wheels of justice may now grind for them, however slowly and however unfairly weighed against them -- imagine trying to prove your innocence while in solitary confinement for perhaps years under harsh conditions. (Here's the story of a Purna Raj Bajracharya, a Nepalese man who was held without charges for three months in "special detention" which meant solitary confinement, even after his arresting officer realized it had all been a mistake and tried to get him released. He was finally deported, much to his relief.)

And while those wheel slowly grind, wars will be waged and elections will come and go -- and sometimes get stolen. It will be just like the Weapons of Mass Destruction story. Oops, we might have been mistaken, the administration now says after Iraq's invaded, occupied and CIA-asset Ayad Allawi is appointed the prime minister. Facts coming out ex-post-war may help discredit the administration but by then what's done is done. What counts would be to have the facts publicly and widely available while there is time to stop a course of events that may well prove very hard to reverse -- and it may be impossible to undo the damage caused by then. (Of course, we knew Bush was lying in the run-up to the war but facts then just couldn't make it through the media filters of the time. Now that it doesn't matter that much, our courageous reporters are a bit better in reporting yesterday's lies.)

If you want to go through the cases to understand what I'm arguing here, here's some more detailed analysis by Elaine Cassel, who also has an upcoming book titled War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights.

Posted by zeynep at 02:36 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 29, 2004

Goodbye, Mattie

Mattie J.T. Stepanek, the 13-year old peace activist and boy-poet from Rockville, MD, has just died from the muscular dystrophy that plagued his short life. At his funeral, Jimmy Carter read from a letter Mattie had written him:

..Soon after, the former president received a letter from his then-12-year-old friend: "I feel like President Bush made a decision long ago about the war," Mattie wrote. "Imagine if he had spent as much time and energy . . . planning peace."

The letter continued, "Even though I want to talk to Osama bin Laden about peace in the future, I wouldn't want to be alone with him in his cave." The congregation dissolved into laughter.

"In the same letter," Carter added, "he asked if I would join him."

Mattie was obviously very perceptive of his own time. I wonder when he asked Jimmy Carter to join him to talk to Osama bin Ladin, did he perhaps know that Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter's national security advisor, had bragged about aiding the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan to deliberately induce the Soviets into invading -- the very chain of events that gave rise to Osama Bin Ladin:

LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

BRZEZINSKI: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.…

LNO: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

BRZEZINSKI: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Here's a poem Mattie wrote when he was ten:

Future Reminiscing

It is good
To have a past
That is pleasant
To reflect upon.
Take care
To create
Such a gift
For your future.

Matthew Joseph Thaddeus Stepanek
December 25, 2000

Posted by zeynep at 01:18 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Who Wants to Guess Where the Car Bomb Will Go Off Today?

Readers of this blog know that I've been covering the story of how little of the money allocated by Congress for Iraqi reconstruction has been actually spent, while billions of dollars of Iraqi oil revenues and Iraqi frozen assets has been spent in a mad dash, without accountability or transparency, sometimes on no-bid contracts to Halliburton. It's been hard to find out how little of the $18.7 has been actually spent but repeated references seem to put it under half a billion. Here's the latest mention, from today's New York Times, putting the number at $400 million:

Another part of the strategy is the speeding of the reconstruction financing, which many officials acknowledge has been frustratingly slow. Of the $18 billion authorized by Congress last year, which Mr. Powell had hoped would be spent by now, only about $5 billion has been awarded to contractors, and less than $400 million has been spent.

Not to worry, though. Our ingenuity and resources will be used to do what we do best. We'll put Allawi on television a lot, to help create the appearance of a strong leader leading a sovereign nation:

At the same time, American officials say that the United States will mobilize all its state-of-the-art television equipment on projecting images of Dr. Allawi around the country, and do its best to publicize his actions and provide secure transportation.

United States will provide secure transportation? Is that the hallmark of a sovereign leader in the new world order: being unable to travel around your own country without protection from foreign troops?

Maybe the security and the publicity needs should be merged in a reality show: "Who Wants to Guess Where the Car Bomb Will Go Off Today?" The audience can call in with guesses and the survivors, ahem, winners could receive fuel for their generators so they can watch more of Allawi on television even during the intermittent blackouts.

In case you think I'm just being over the top sarcastic, here's a spot from the recently launched Al-Sharqiya, Iraq's first privately owned TV channel:

A journalist stops a man in a Baghdad street and asks about the security situation. The man cheerfully replies: "Security has vastly improved, we used to go home at 7:30 p.m. but now we can stay out as late as 7:45!"

A sound effect of an explosion during the conversation shakes the camera, adding a tongue-in-cheek dose of reality to the comedy clip by a new Iraqi channel aiming to win audiences with a unique style of political and social satire.

Posted by zeynep at 12:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 28, 2004

Rule by Proxy

This is why most colonial powers prefer to install some proxy government under their control to their bidding rather than rule directly:

The defense minister, Hazim Shaalan, is a former banker who more recently worked as a real-estate agent in London. "After June 30," said Shaalan, "we will hit these people and teach them a good lesson they won't forget. Americans and allied forces have certain restrictions we won't have." He declined to be more specific, except to say, "It's our country, it's our culture, and we have different laws than you do." (A few days later, after yet another suicide bombing, he was more blunt: "We will cut off their hands and behead them.")

It's been demonstrated time and time again that people in the colonial-master country are far more sensitive to the conduct of their countrymen stationed in the colony than to the conduct of the local hirelings and proxies. We don't like it if our armed forces kills a few people directly but it's barely news if someone we hire or control kills dozens or hundreds in order to protect the interests of the colonial-master and a few local cronies.

Posted by zeynep at 02:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Bremer Turns Sovereignty over to Negroponte; Issues Another Bunch of Edicts

Right before handing the job over to Negroponte, a few days earlier then scheduled, Bremer rushed to issue a bunch of edicts which would be hard to turn over, and involve multi-year appointments to key positions, immunity for civilian contractors, among many other things.

This sham turnover is getting hard to blog about. Here’s the Cliff Notes version: “[Bremer] has installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry.... an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.... a 30-year minimum sentence for people caught selling weapons such as grenades... banks to collect detailed personal information from customers seeking to make transactions greater than $3,500... rules that cap tax rates at 15 percent, prohibit piracy of intellectual property, ban children younger than 15 from working, and a new traffic code that stipulates the use of a car horn in ‘emergency conditions only’ and requires a driver to ‘hold the steering wheel with both hands.’”

There we go! For once I agree with Paul Bremer III: urban traffic in the Middle East is really scary. And the number of people driving at breakneck speed, gesticulating with one hand, honking the horn with the other with barely a pinky on the wheel... Glad that’s taken care of.

Also, significantly “[An earlier edict by Bremer] states that no party can be associated with a militia or get money from one....” As Leslie Campbell points out in the same piece, that means almost nobody can run because “all the major Iraqi political parties are associated with armed organizations.”

And of course, ho-hum. The suspense is over. Bremer signed "an edict that gave U.S. and other Western civilian contractors immunity from Iraqi law while performing their jobs in Iraq."

It's grand to be sovereign.

Posted by zeynep at 12:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

It's not torture unless it kills you -- in which case, we deeply regret the error and promise to try to jail a private or two for a year or two

Pulling out fingernails one by one probably would not constitute torture under the definitions of the August 2002 Justice Department memo because it's not likely to result in “death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions.” The memo, desperately searching for a loophole wide enough to allow for torture, defines “severe pain” as the level of pain “associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions.” In other words, if the pain inflicted is not about to cause organ failure or death, it’s not severe enough to be defined as torture.

So, where did they get this definition? It’s clever in a scary kind of way. The memo explains that the federal law against torture uses severe pain as a key criterion without defining it. So, the authors decide to define it and, in a flash of brilliance, propose that “the statutes regulating what kind of emergency medical conditions qualify for payments of health benefits” would be a “good model.”

Although these statutes address a substantially different subject from Section 2340, they are nonetheless helpful for understanding what constitutes severe pain. They treat severe pain as an indicator of ailments that are likely to result in permanent and serious physical damage in the absence of immediate medical treatment. Such damage must rise to the level of death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function. These statutes suggest that "severe pain" as used in Section 2340, must rise to a similarly high level, the level that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions in order to constitute torture.

Well, duh. Substantially different subject, indeed. In regular life, people experience such severe pain almost solely in association with serious health problems at the “level of death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function” because ordinary Americans who show up at emergency rooms are not shackled in “stress positions” that cut off circulation, subjected to extreme heat or cold, sleep-deprived for days, attacked by dogs or ruthlessly beaten. They have severe pain because of illness or injury; detainees who have been tortured have severe pain because they have been tortured, not because they have kidney failure or cancer.

This is so blatantly dishonest a loophole that it’s hard to imagine how they told each other with a serious face that this would hold up. It’s like pointing out that the inflating of the airbag would be associated with an accident serious enough to severely damage the fenders, proceeding to smash the fenders on your parked car with a baseball bat, and then claiming the damage to the fenders cannot be defined as severe because your airbag has not inflated.

Posted by zeynep at 12:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

We only torture bad people, honest

The New York Times is reporting that the August 2002 memo by the Justice Department has been written as an after-the-fact rationalization of “extreme” interrogation techniques already used against high-level Al Qaeda members such as Abu Zubaydah. In other words, they were already using these techniques and were worried about legal cover so they asked the Justice Department for advice.(Yes, there are many memos floating around and it gets confusing; this one was the ‘royalist’ memo arguing that the President in his Commander-in-Chief capacity could authorize torture and could not be held accountable under international treaties or federal torture laws.)

Until now, it has not been clear that the memo was written in response to the C.I.A.'s efforts to extract information from high-ranking Qaeda suspects, and was unrelated to questions about handling detainees at Guantánamo Bay or in Iraq.

It all reads a bit like spin from administration officials eager to make an acceptable case for what their attack-dogs are openly claiming: the torture was necessary to save American lives:

In the end, administration officials considered Mr. Zubaydah's interrogation an example of the successful use of harsh interrogation techniques. Most notably, they said, he helped identify Mr. Mohammed as the principal architect of the September 2001 hijacking plot and was the source of information about Jose Padilla, who was arrested in May 2002 in what officials said was a nascent plot to develop a dirty bomb using radiological materials.

The article also explains that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was indeed “waterboarded” -- strapped to a board and immersed in water to the point of almost drowning. Admittedly, being told someone’s an architect of 9/11 dilutes one’s aversion to torture -- and that’s the argument being made here.

From Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, though, we also go to Jose Padilla how this article now tells us was fingered by Abu Zubaydah under torture. We also know that somehow the Justice Department doesn’t seem to have much on Jose Padilla who is nonetheless being held indefinitely without charges or access to courts -- for all we know, he’s the cousin of a friend of an Al Qaeda sympathizer whose name Zubaydah happened to know because he thought an American citizen might be useful at some point. From there on, we have thousands of people held in Abu Ghraib under questionable conditions at best, and some definitely tortured and at least dozens killed plus a worldwide, lawless enclave where men, and a few women, disappear into and emerge months or year later, if at all, without being charged with even having wielded a pointed stick against Americans or anyone else.

Somehow, the administration would have us believe, they authorized torture under very controlled conditions for a few mass murderers and somehow, magically, the practice just spread all around U.S. detention centers around the world, from bad apple to bad apple.

Even if we accept administration’s spin, this would be a good example of what anti-torture advocates have always pointed out. Once you authorize it, the conduct will spread. If you are tempted to use it on someone who you are sure is guilty, you will be tempted to use it on someone of whose guilt you think you are sure, followed by using it on anyone who you think might be guilty and so on. Second, you will get bad information because people will say anything to make it stop and you will not be able to tell the bad information from real information.

Incidentally, we also learn in this piece that CIA's suspension of "enhanced" techniques does not apply to Guantanamo or other military prisons. So where is CIA interrogating people?

An article in Sunday's Washington Post reported that the C.I.A. had suspended the use of the extreme interrogation tactics at the agency's detention facilities around the world pending a review by Justice Department and other administration lawyers, although the decision does not apply to military prisons such as the one at Guantánamo Bay.

Posted by zeynep at 12:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 27, 2004

CIA suspends "enhanced interrogation"

The CIA has suspended some of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” -- pending review by Justice Department and “other lawyers.” Apparently, the move “reflects the agency's concern about being accused of unsanctioned and illegal activities, as it was in the 1970s.”

Well, one thing is that this time around we know that the Justice Department had decreed that torture was either legal or unprosecutable. It was only after the Abu Ghraib pictures became public that the administration decided to review the previous legal “advice.”

Still, it’s good to know they’ve stopped refusal of pain medication and mock drowning. That’s right, refusal of pain medication was among the “enhanced” techniques that we used.

Report: CIA Halts Interrogation Tactics The techniques include such things as feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries.

The paper quoted current and former CIA officers aware of the recent decision as saying the suspension reflects the agency's concern about being accused of unsanctioned and illegal activities, as it was in the 1970s.

It’s important to note that the “legal advice” was more “how can we get away with what we want to do” rather than “what are we allowed to do.” International or domestic laws regarding torture have not changed; rather, the public outcry over the photos has changed the parameters of can be gotten away with. Hence the need for new “interpretations.”

The administration argument, between the lines and from the mouths of its attack-dogs has been that it’s better to do a little bit of unsavory activity on the side rather than risk more American casualties. Here’s Trent Lott, for example:

You recently created a stir when you defended the interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib.

Most of the people in Mississippi came up to me and said: ''Thank Goodness. America comes first.'' Interrogation is not a Sunday-school class. You don't get information that will save American lives by withholding pancakes.

But unleashing killer dogs on naked Iraqis is not the same as withholding pancakes.

I was amazed that people reacted like that. Did the dogs bite them? Did the dogs assault them? How are you going to get people to give information that will lead to the saving of lives?

Well, the dogs did bite the prisoners but let me not digress.

The truth of the matter is that, even from a purely pragmatic point of view, it is exactly this unsavory activity that is making all of us less safe. Many experts have noted that torture produces so much unreliable information as the victims says anything to make it stop, the results are hard to turn into “actionable intelligence” even if they contain some truths among them. On the other hand, it produces many people who now really might be willing to die for a chance for payback.

Think about it -- how do you sift through information gathered from thousands of people whom you have made very, very eager to lie to you to avoid being electrocuted, drowned or raped? Do you go investigate everything they claim? How can you tell the “stop torturing me” confession from a true confession?

And remember that a February 2004 Red Cross report estimated that 70 to 90 percent of detainees in Abu Ghraib “had been arrested by mistake,” and what little we know about the Guantanamo detainees indicates that many of them seemed to have posed very little threat to the United States before being imprisoned for years without charges or lawyers, and that they even included teens under the age of sixteen. Considering those teens spent years at Guantanamo, I can't help wonder how old they were when they were captured.

And, of course, why are these techniques "suspended"? Does the CIA expect them to become legal or acceptable some time in the future?

Posted by zeynep at 03:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 26, 2004

Iraqi resistance condemns the car bombings

Something pretty interesting happened in response to the wave of car bombings that killed over a hundred people in Iraq last Thursday. Many of the visible, Iraqi faces of the resistance condemned the bombings loudly and scathingly. Everyone from Sunni clerics to fighters in Fallujah to Moqtada Sadr said that they viewed the attacks as indefensible, shedding innocent blood and giving an excuse to the occupiers.

This is a pretty significant development. Abu Musab Zarqawi’s brand of politics is a serious danger for any future hope Iraq might have to become a tolerant, independent and hopefully democratic nation. If it ever took hold, it could actually spark the civil war that the media is fond of declaring as the reason why we “can’t cut and run” -- even though it seems as our presence there is now the main reason Zarqawi can exist and, perhaps, find a base. Most victims of violent Islamic extremism have always been other muslims, as in case of Algeria, and Iraq has so far been no different. While the gruesome beheadings of westerners have gotten a lot of media attention --and that was clearly the intention of the killers-- stories about car-bombings victims by the dozen or gunned-down cleaning women barely the news cycle.

Foes of U.S. in Iraq Criticize Insurgents

Key Iraqi opponents of the U.S. occupation expressed unease Friday over the wave of insurgent attacks that killed more than 100 Iraqis a day earlier, and rejected efforts by foreign guerrillas to take the lead in the insurgency and mate it with the international jihad advocated by Osama bin Laden.

The objections -- from anti-U.S. Shiite and Sunni Muslim leaders, including rebellious cleric Moqtada Sadr, and even from militia fighters in the embattled city of Fallujah -- arose in part from revulsion at the fact that victims of the car bombings and guerrilla assaults in six cities and towns Thursday were overwhelmingly Iraqis. But they also betrayed Iraqi nationalist concerns that the fight against U.S. occupation forces risked being hijacked by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian whom U.S. officials describe as a paladin in bin Laden's al Qaeda network.

"We do not need anyone from outside the borders to stand with us and spill the blood of our sons in Iraq," Ahmed Abdul Ghafour Samarrae, a Sunni cleric with a wide following, declared in his Friday sermon at Umm al Qurra mosque in Baghdad.

...

"Which religion allows anyone to kill more than 100 Iraqis, destroy 100 families and destroy 100 houses?" raged Samarrae in his sermon. "Who says so? Who are those people who do this? Where did they come from? . . . It is a conspiracy to defame the reputation of the Iraqi resistance by wearing its dress and using its name falsely. These people hurt the Iraqis and Iraq, giving the occupier an excuse to stay longer."

In a similar vein, a group of masked fighters in Fallujah stood before Reuters television cameras and read a statement insisting that the city's violent struggle against surrounding U.S. Marines is being carried out by Fallujans, not Zarqawi or other foreign fighters.
"The American invader forces claim that Zarqawi, and with him a group of Arab fighters, are in our city," said one of the heavily armed men, reading from a paper. "We know that this talk about Zarqawi and the fighters is a game that the American invader forces are playing to strike Islam and Muslims in the city of mosques, steadfast Fallujah."

Shortly after their declaration, the U.S. military launched precision weapons against what it called a Zarqawi safe house, the third such strike in less than a week.

In Baqubah, where scores of fighters proclaiming allegiance to Zarqawi attacked police stations and government buildings in Thursday's offensive, clerics called on the faithful not to support such attacks. The attackers, they said in their Friday sermons, were foreigners attacking Iraqis.

"This is the first time we have heard the minaret broadcast support for the Iraqi government," said Edward Peter Messmer, the occupation authority's coordinator for the Baqubah region, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. "And it couldn't come at a better time."

Sadr, whose Mahdi Army has fought U.S. troops in the Sadr City slum in eastern Baghdad and in Najaf, 90 miles to the south, ordered his followers to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi police in Sadr City to "deprive the terrorists and saboteurs of the chance to incite chaos and extreme lawlessness."

...

Aws Khafaji, a cleric in Sadr's militantly political stream of Shiite Islam, disowned Thursday's violence even more clearly in a sermon at the Hikma mosque in Sadr City.

"We condemn and denounce yesterday's bombings and attacks on police centers and innocent Iraqis, which claimed about 100 lives," he said. "These are attacks launched by suspects and lunatics who are bent on destabilizing the country and ruining the peace so that the Iraqi people will remain in need of American protection."

Posted by zeynep at 06:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 25, 2004

UN-mandated auditors encounter "bureaucratic hurdles" in entering the Green Zone

The Green Zone is the heavily fortified part of Baghdad that houses the CPA and most western institutions and journalists. It turns out that UN-mandated auditors encountered "bureaucratic hurdles" in entering the Green Zone, which they needed to do in order to audit CPA's management of the Development Fund for Iraq -- some $20 billion of Iraqi money the CPA has been spending over the last year:

[The Auditors] have also encountered bureaucratic hurdles in obtaining the passes needed to enter the “green zone” where CPA and government offices are based.

These are the people that lecture other countries about how corrupt and untransparent they are. (Well, to be sure, many countries are corrupt and untransparent. This just shows that they don't believe in those principles, they just use them as convenient beating sticks)

Posted by zeynep at 04:39 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Fighting in Iraq

In a noteworthy post, Empire Notes argues that if the famed al-Zarqawi is indeed able to recruit in Iraq things are very bad indeed, especially for the people of Iraq. Yesterday hundreds were killed in Iraq as car bombs were set off by the insurgents and the U.S. dropped 500-pound bombs.

What struck me was that the worst of the bloodshed occurred in Mosul -- previously an example of how well things were.

Posted by zeynep at 04:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2004

Andrea Mitchell Wins; Problem of Immovable Object meets Irresistable Force Solved

What happens if a high-level official tells a prominent member of the media elite that the widespread Muslim discontent stems mainly from our policies and what we do and not from an irrational hatred of who we are? What happens when the imperative not to contradict high-level officials clashes with the imperative of never straying from the official line?

Well, read it here. I link, you decide whether to laugh or cry.

Posted by zeynep at 04:46 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Ayatollah Khomeini's 1964 Speech Condemning U.S. Immunity

As I just posted, Bremer's last act is expected to be bestowing of blanket immunity to U.S. troops and perhaps contractors. "History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce," goes an oft-quoted phrase from Marx. I fail to detect the farce yet but repetition there is a lot of.

So, here's a trip down memory lane with excerpts from Ayatollah Rohollah Khomeini's key speech in 1964 condemning a similarly blanket immunity deal the U.S. struck with the Shah of Iran. The very, very popular speech led to Khomeini's exile in Najaf -- marked a turning point in his rise:

...All American military advisers, together with their families, technical and administrative officials, and servants - in short, anyone in any way connected to them - are to enjoy legal immunity with respect to any crime they may commit in Iran! If some American's servant, some American's cook, assassinates your marja'-i taqlid in the middle of the bazaar, or runs over him, the Iranian police do not have the right to apprehend him! Iranian courts do not have the right to judge him! The dossier must be sent to America so that our masters there can decide what is to be done!

The previous government approved this measure without telling anyone, and now the present government just recently introduced a bill in the Senate and settled the whole matter in a single session without breathing a word to anyone. A few days ago, the bill was taken to the lower house of the Parliament and there were discussions, with a few deputies voicing their opposition, but the bill was passed anyhow. They passed it without any shame, and the government shamelessly defended this scandalous measure. They have reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog. If someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he will be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he would be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, or the marja' of Iran, or the highest official, no one will have the right to object.
...
Gentlemen, I warn you of danger!

Iranian army, I warn you of danger!

Iranian politicians, I warn you of danger!

Iranian merchants, I warn you of danger!

`Ulama of Iran, maraji' of Islam, I warn you of danger!

Scholars, religious students! Centres of religious learning, Najaf, Qum, Mashhad, Tehran, Shiraz! I warn you of danger!

It is a dangerous situation. It is clear that there are things kept under cover that we know nothing about. In the Parliament they have said that they have to be kept secret! It is evident that they are dreaming up further plans for us. What else can they do that is worse than this? What are they planning? What will this loan inflict on this nation? Should this impoverished nation now pay $100 million in interest to America over the next ten years and at the same time should you sell us for this? What use to you are the American soldiers and military advisers? If this country is occupied by America, then what is all this noise you make about progress? If these advisers are to be your servants, then why do you treat them like something superior to masters, superior to a Shah? If they are servants, why not treat them as such? If they are your employees, then why not treat them as any other government treats its employees? If our country is now occupied by the US then tell us outright and throw us out of this country!

Posted by zeynep at 09:55 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Bremer's last act (before washing his hands of the occupation)

Faced with certain rejection from the Security Council, the United States withdrew its campaign for the renewal of a resolution granting American soldiers immunity from the new International Criminal Court. Meanwhile, it's granting itself immunity in Iraq: the Washington Post is now reporting that one of Bremer’s last acts as the pro-consul will be to extend Order 17 which provides exemption from Iraqi law to all foreign personnel of the U.S.-led occupation troops:

The Bush administration has decided to take the unusual step of bestowing on its own troops and personnel immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for killing Iraqis or destroying local property after the occupation ends and political power is transferred to an interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials said.

The administration plans to accomplish that step -- which would bypass the most contentious remaining issue before the transfer of power -- by extending an order that has been in place during the year-long occupation of Iraq. Order 17 gives all foreign personnel in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority immunity from "local criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction and from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their parent states."

The order is expected to cover the next six or seven months after which the U.S. is hoping for gaining immunity through a “status-of-forces” agreement, something it does with many other countries where it has troop presence. The failure of the U.N. resolution right at the heels of the Abu Ghraib scandal is symbolically rather than materially significant since the U.S. already has bilateral immunity agreements with 90 countries.

The main question on the table was not whether it was acceptable to bestow immunity from rape and murder to hundreds of thousands of troops and contractors while evidence of egregious conduct continues to trickle in, but rather it was how to best do bestow that immunity while retaining the “optics” required for the upcoming transfer of sovereignty ceremonies:

The administration is taking the step in an effort to prevent the new Iraqi government from having to grant a blanket waiver as one of its first acts, which could undermine its credibility just as it assumes power. But U.S. officials said Washington's act could also create the impression that the United States is not turning over full sovereignty -- and giving itself special privileges.

Of course, we knew this was coming for months now -- the British Observer had reported on the deal some time ago and Washington's insistence on this subject is well-known.

There is the appearance of haggling over the status of “some foreign contractors, many of whom are engaged in security operations.” It wouldn’t be surprising if the United States obtains immunity for those that should have it least, private mercenaries carrying and using guns, while excluding people who do the laundry.

Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s objections are among the main reason that the U.S. is having to grant itself the immunity rather than have the CIA-asset Iyad Allawi's government issue the order after June 30th. The question of immunity of troops of occupiers or colonizers, or extraterritoriality as it is commonly referred, has always been one of the key ingredients in fueling popular uprisings and revolts in colonies. As the Post piece reports, another influential Ayatollah in the region first rose through his vocal opposition to immunity granted to U.S. troops.

His name was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

A similar grant of immunity to U.S. troops in Iran during the Johnson administration in the 1960s led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the issue to charge that the shah had sold out the Iranian people.

"Our honor has been trampled underfoot; the dignity of Iran has been destroyed," Khomeini said in a famous 1964 speech that led to his detention and then expulsion from Iran. The measure "reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog."

Posted by zeynep at 08:01 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 23, 2004

Conquer and Plunder

The CPA has spent about $10.8 billion and committed another $4.6 billion in Iraqi oil money from the "Development Fund for Iraq" where all the proceeds of Iraqi oil and gas exports are being deposited in accordance with the May 2003 U.N. resolution. The International Advisory and Monitoring Board, appointed by the United Nations to audit the fund, has issued an interim report charging that coalition officials "resisted cooperating with the auditors," refused to turnover "U.S. audits of sole-source contracts funded with Iraqi oil money and awarded to Halliburton last year without competitive bidding," and "delayed completing audits of the State Oil Marketing Organization" which markets Iraqi oil.

Here's the highlights from the Reuters story:

The U.S.-led occupation is sloppily managing billions of dollars of Iraqi oil money and moving at a glacial pace to guard against corruption, an international watchdog agency charged on Tuesday.

The Coalition Provisional Authority has yet to award contracts for equipment to meter Iraq's oil production, leaving a door open to smuggling, despite earlier saying it had awarded the contracts, the International Advisory and Monitoring Board said.

The U.S.-led administration also has delayed completing audits of the State Oil Marketing Organization, the state-owned firm that markets Iraqi oil, the U.N.-mandated agency said.

In addition, authorities in Baghdad have put off for three months a request by the board that it turn over U.S. audits of sole-source contracts funded with Iraqi oil money and awarded to Halliburton last year without competitive bidding, the watchdog agency said.

Halliburton, the Texas oil services firm once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been accused by some Democrats of war profiteering after winning billions of dollars in sole-source contracts from the U.S. military in Iraq.

The U.S. audits of the Halliburton contracts paid with Iraqi oil money, initially requested in March, had not yet been handed over despite repeated requests, the board said.

All the delaying and obstructing of the audit process means that the U.N. mandated audit may never be completed:

One adviser to a member of the recently disbanded Iraqi Governing Council said the report raised the fear that no audit of the CPA's work would ever be completed. "If the auditors don't finish by June 30, they never will, because the CPA staff are going home," he said. "I lament the lack of transparency and lack of involvement by Iraqis."

Posted by zeynep at 10:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

U.S. Troops May Enforce Martial Law in Iraq

CIA-asset Ayad Allawi, appointed prime-minister by the United States, had been talking about imposing martial law for a few days now. Yesterday, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee that U.S. troops might be the enforcers:

Wolfowitz said it is possible that U.S. troops could be used to enforce Iraqi martial law after the partial transfer of power a week from now. Ayad Alawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, has said martial law is possible to crack down on insurgents.

It's also possible, Wolfowitz argued, that U.S. troops may be there for many years:

[Ranking Democratic Representative Ike]Skelton asked if US forces would be in Iraq for "a good many years."

"That is entirely possible," said Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz also said that "the end is when Iraqis are governing their own country."

One keeps needing to recap because the administration keeps describing an alternative universe and the media do not challenge it anywhere near enough. So here's quick run down of last year:

The Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Bremer III, scrapped local elections early on and later proposed a misnamed "caucus" process that would only allow people vetted by the CPA to appoint the interim government. The idea was dropped when Grand Ayatollah Sistani, along with a few hundred thousand Iraqi demonstrators, said no way and put forth the radical idea of one person, one vote, now. CPA said maybe later and unilaterally appointed a CIA-asset involved in acts of terrorism against Iraq as prime minister. Now we're told we might be enforcing martial law in Iraq and be there for many years until "Iraqis are governing their country." Which they seem quite eager to but which we do not seem to want to allow.

Keep all that in mind next time someone describes this administration and the neo-cons as "idealists" who "unrealistically" want to "impose democracy" in the Middle East.

Posted by zeynep at 09:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 22, 2004

We have always spent Iraqi money on that

"You want to hire everybody on the street, put money in their pockets and make them like you. We have always spent Iraqi money on that."

It turns out our oft-repeated generosity towards Iraq mainly involves using Iraqi money distributed as cash in $100 bills by American military teams roaming the country -- all the while spending very little of the actual aid money designated by Congress as Iraqi reconstruction funds, and even that only as contracts to corrupt and wasteful American firms that do very little reconstruction and very little hiring of Iraqis.

It’s really unbelievable. You have to keep pondering the numbers to let it all sink.

It turns out that, of the $18 billion designated for reconstruction, as little as half a billion might have been actually spent. Meanwhile, we are currently rushing to spend about $2.5 billions of current Iraqi oil revenues on “ill-conceived projects” before June 30 when control of that money would pass to the Interim Government. We have also already spent one or two billion in Iraqi frozen assets -- we don’t know the exact number because who’s counting when it’s their money? And, most of that spending is contracts to American companies or bribes and pay-offs distributed by Americans.

And yet, in spite of these facts, “all this money” we are spending on rebuilding Iraq has been prominent in the talking points of both the left and the right. In fact, I have seen many commentators on the left complain that we were spending money on Iraq when schools here are crumbling. It’s true enough that many public schools are in dire need of funds and attention but the problem is certainly not that we are spending money on Iraqi reconstruction. Of course, by any minimal standards of justice, we should actually spend money on Iraq since we broke the country through the sanctions and the war. It turns out we are just complaining about spending the money while spending their money as we please.

Remember the $87 billion that Bush asked for the war earlier on? Well, only $18.7 billion of it was allocated for reconstruction of Iraq -- the rest is funds for the United States military to function while occupying Iraq. Some of it, like soldiers salaries, would have been spent anyway. Some are expenses due to the occupation but that’s hardly money we are spending on Iraq. Of that money, only a small sum has been awarded in contracts:

About $3.7 billion of this package had been spent by June 1, according to the CPA. Many projects that have received funding have slowed or stopped entirely because Western firms have withdrawn employees from Iraq in response to attacks on civilian contractors.

Note that even that supposed $3.7 billion is not money that is actually spent. It’s actually contracts “awarded”.

Only $3.2 billion in contracts for actual construction projects have been awarded, although the number could rise before June 30.

It’s hard to come by the money actually spent, thanks to the lack of transparency with the CPA. However, reports are that it might be as little as half a billion dollars:

"Only some $500 million has been spent of the $18.7 billion" Congress authorized for reconstruction, said an administration official familiar with the transition plans.

Of course, note how these projects stop when Western firms withdraw employees. Because instead of being contracts that use local resources and generate revenue and employment for the local economy, most these are contracts to Halliburton, Bechtel et al:

Because many of the 2,300 projects to be funded by the $18.6 billion are large construction endeavors that will involve foreign laborers instead of Iraqis, they will result in far less of a local economic boost than the CPA had promised, another senior official involved in the reconstruction said. The projects were chosen largely without input from Iraqis.

The number of Iraqis employed by our generosity in a country with desperate levels of unemployment? According to the Post, only 15,000 in a country of 22 million.

About 15,000 Iraqis have been hired to work on projects funded by $18.6 billion in U.S. aid

What we are doing is spending Iraqi oil money and doing it as quickly as we can before the “handover”:

With international attention focused on the impending transfer of power in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority is committing billions of dollars to ill-conceived projects just before it dissolves, according to a new briefing by the Open Society Institute's Iraq Revenue Watch Project. The briefing, Iraqi Fire Sale: CPA Giving Away Oil Revenue Billions Before Transition, says that the U.S.-controlled Program Review Board in charge of managing Iraq's finances recently approved the expenditure of nearly $2 billion dollars in Iraqi funds for reconstruction projects.

The New York Times picked up on the story a few days ago:

Struggling with bureaucratic problems in spending the money appropriated by Congress to rebuild Iraq, American authorities are moving quietly and quickly to spend $2.5 billion from a different source, Iraqi oil revenue, for projects employing tens of thousands of Iraqis, especially in the country's hot spots, Bush administration officials say.

On top of using Iraqi oil revenues, we have also spent frozen Iraqi assets as we pleased:

Some of the money has gone to American military teams operating since the beginning of the occupation 14 months ago. The teams have become famous in Iraq for the way they have spread across the country, commissioning repairs and paying for them from satchels bulging with $100 bills shipped by plane from a Federal Reserve vault in East Rutherford, N.J. Much of that money came from Iraqi assets frozen in the United States during the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

At least $1 billion has been distributed in this fashion - by some estimates more than $2 billion.

"The military commanders love that program, because it buys them friends," said an administration official, referring to the cash distribution. "You want to hire everybody on the street, put money in their pockets and make them like you. We have always spent Iraqi money on that."

So, after the handover, Iraqis will have much less money to spend as they wish while “ambassador” Negroponte will be left with significant sums to distribute, adding to the degree of control already provided by 138,000 troops over any Iraqi government the people of Iraq might wish to elect.

Welcome to our efforts to promote democracy, sovereignty and transparency in the Middle East.

And don’t let anyone tell you our schools are crumbling because we are instead spending that money on schools in Iraq. Whatever's crumbling --here or there-- is crumbling because this administration simply prefers to spend money as much as possible on enriching their cronies, and mostly in ways that enhance their control, and as little as possible on projects that do some actual good.

Posted by zeynep at 05:53 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 21, 2004

Let's Create Some Optics, Baby

Creating optics when the underlying substance hasn't changed is what worries Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz these days:

Wolfowitz told reporters traveling with him, making clear that U.S. forces had no intention of withdrawing from the fight. "But we would like people to see that something has changed. In the first few weeks, a lot of the challenge is how to create some optics when the underlying substance hasn't changed that much."

They've come a long way with the optical illusions -- big media and the United Nations Security Council already refer to "June 30th" as the date for "transfer of sovereignty." Now, if it just weren't for those pesky natives...

Posted by zeynep at 08:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 20, 2004

A New Style of Offensive

There was an airstrike against a house in Fallujah that killed at least a few dozen people with some children among the dead. The way it was carried out and reported on by the U.S. media serves as an early demonstration of how things will be done in Iraq after "the handover."

The U.S. military will attack from a distance with missiles, major newspapers will report from Kimmit's press conferences without going over to the site of the attack and CIA-asset Iyad Allawi will defend whatever it was the U.S. forces did. Meanwhile, the local authorities and police forces, eyewitnesses and journalists on the scene will report otherwise. The story will fade and we will discuss why they hate us so irrationally and why polls in Iraq show that they want us out, and they want us out now.

Tellingly, the New York Times calls this style of attack "avoidance of bloodbath," meaning, of course, that Americans were not killed:

The airstrike also allowed the military to stage an attack in Falluja without sending troops into the city, avoiding the kind of pitched urban battles that resulted in the April bloodbath. Ten marines and hundreds of Iraqis were killed. This strike could be the first of a series by the Americans in a new style of offensive there.

Even the headline is hard to justify: "Strike Aimed at Terrorists Kills 17 in Falluja." One would hope that in order to claim that an attack was aimed at terrorists, they would've demanded some proof which Kimmit pretty much confesses they don't have:

"We know there were members of the Zarqawi network inside the house," the general [Kimmit] said. He added that the attack was based on "actionable intelligence." But there was no evidence that Mr. Zarqawi was in the house or anywhere else in Falluja, he said.

Reported like that everything looks like innocent, well-meaning mistakes.

Other news sources bylined "Fallujah" and not "Baghdad" like the NYT --or probably, more accurately, 'the green zone'-- are reporting that Fallujah police and neighbors of the pulverized house are saying that the house was a regular house with lots of children and ordinary people residing there. This pattern has become so chillingly predictable that there is no excuse left.

Posted by zeynep at 05:08 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 18, 2004

Pandering to my readers

It's been pointed out that I should include the link for sending letters to the editors when blogging about media coverage -- as in the case of the last entry about the Washington Post story which gave ample space and legitimacy to the critics Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez who were complaining that the poor were receiving social services financed by -gasp- oil revenues.

In a moment of weakness, I decided to pander to my readers. You can send e-mail letters to letters@washpost.com. Don't send attachments and, as always, keep in mind that concise, polite letters are more effective.

Posted by zeynep at 02:44 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Stop Pandering to the Poor, Mr. Chavez.

Another anti-Chavez piece with some information and a lot of barely disguised hostility. Check out the brilliant headline: "With Social Programs, Chavez Buying Loyalty, Critics Charge."

Really! Who do you think those oil revenues are for? "Buying" loyalty by providing social services and education? Shame on you, Mr. Chavez.

Can you imagine similar headlines for other institutions doing their jobs, such as a state actually trying to help the poor. "With Providing Crucial Aid during Disasters, Red Cross Buying Loyalty, Critics Charge"; "By Providing Health Care, Hospitals Buying Loyalty, Critics Charge."

But critics say Chavez is pandering to the poor to save his political career and gambling irresponsibly with the long-term fiscal health of a state company that provides half the country's revenues.

Of course, the opposition is so fiscally responsible. Their strike last year, aimed at ousting the legally elected president, managed to shut down the oil industry --since they had occupied all the key positions-- at a cost of many, many billions of Dollars to Venezuela's national economy. Now that some money is being spent on the poor, we are all suddenly worried about "fiscal health."

And the article goes on to quote a very responsible sounding Alfredo Keller:

But Alfredo Keller, a pollster and political analyst, said Chavez was trying to "buy loyalty to maintain power" and "using the oil industry as a political weapon." Keller said Chavez was playing on the fears of a nation where 67 percent of the people live in poverty, 35 percent live in extreme poverty, three-quarters of the population is either unemployed or works in the informal sector, and there have been 43,000 homicides in the past five years.

And if Venezuela's people finally give up after so much assault, you know it will be heralded as proof of Chavez's unpopularity.

Posted by zeynep at 02:31 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack

"No expenses were held"

Abdul Wali, who died after being beaten for two days by David Passaro in Asadabad, Afghanistan, had surrendered voluntarily.

Here's the account from the man who convinced Wali to give himself up:

Sayed Fazl Akbar, speaking into his son's tape recorder, said he asked the Americans to hold off using military force to capture Wali, who he said "had been on the Americans' and the coalition force's most-wanted list for cooperating with terrorists or being a terrorist." Wali was deeply fearful of turning himself in to the Americans, said the elder Akbar, so Akbar sent his son to go with him "as a sign of trust." Said Hyder Akbar: "So I took him to the Americans. And, like, they're asking him where he was 14 days ago on the night of the three rockets. And this guy, like, don't have calendars, you know? . . . I just put my hand on his shoulder and I let him know: 'Just say the truth. Nothing is going to happen if you just say the truth.' And he was absolutely petrified, and he could barely whisper the okay."

Three days later, Hyder Akbar and his father returned to Asadabad to check on Wali. A translator named Steve and another American named Dave sat down with them, according to Hyder Akbar, and said, "Unfortunately, Abdul Wali passed away." Hyder Akbar said: "My jaw dropped. It's like 'Oh, my God.' . . . They said that at 3:30, 4, he just collapsed and they tried to make him stand again. And he stood for a second, but then he fell again and then they did the whole routine with the CPR and they said no expenses were held, just like they would have treated an American life."

Hyder Akbar said the Americans told him Wali was well treated, but that he had "put rocks in his mouth," tried to break free of his shackles and "hit his head against the wall a couple of times." Akbar said he was taken to see the body and saw no marks on Wali.

"It's hard not to feel responsible," Akbar said. "Poor guy was only 28. He was just so scared."

Posted by zeynep at 02:17 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Crime and Punishment

You might have already heard that a contractor employed by the CIA, David Passaro, has been indicted for “brutally” beating Abdul Wali over the course of two days in the Asadabad Base in Afhanistan. Abdul Wali died after those days of beating but somehow Aschroft’s DOJ did not find enough evidence to press those charges. But still, he is being charged in U.S. courts with potentially serious consequences. This is quite a development, and the first instance of a civilian being tried for their conduct within the scope of the “war on terror” against a non-U.S. national

But here’s the most interesting thing from the justice department press release, noticed by Phil Carter of Intel-Dump.

The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 gives the United States jurisdiction in the Passaro case. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, the PATRIOT Act expanded the law enforcement powers of the United States and eased the challenges of prosecuting crimes and terrorist attacks abroad. Section 804 of the Act, later codified as 18 USC Section 7(9), provides jurisdiction over crimes committed by or against any U.S. national on lands or facilities designated for use by the United States government, such as the Asadabad Base.

Here’s what this all means -- again mostly paraphrased from Phil Carter’s blog.

Sec. 804 of the USA PATRIOT amends 18 U.S.C. 7, the "special maritime and territorial jurisdiction" statute of federal criminal law, to include U.S. military bases and embassies outside of the U.S. The definition of “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction” is really important in determining where federal laws do and don’t apply -- and it’s one of the central wrangling points in the case before the Supreme Court regarding the Guantanamo detainees’ access to courts.

Here's the relevant text of 18 U.S.C. 7:

Section 7. Special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States defined

The term "special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States", as used in this title, includes:

(9) With respect to offenses committed by or against a national of the United States as that term is used in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act -

(A) the premises of United States diplomatic, consular, military or other United States Government missions or entities in foreign States, including the buildings, parts of buildings, and land appurtenant or ancillary thereto or used for purposes of those missions or entities, irrespective of ownership; and

(B) residences in foreign States and the land appurtenant or ancillary thereto, irrespective of ownership, used for purposes of those missions or entities or used by United States personnel assigned to those missions or entities. Nothing in this paragraph shall be deemed to supersede any treaty or international agreement with which this paragraph conflicts.

What this all means is that, according to the Patriot Act, federal criminal law now applies to all the premises of U.S. government missions -- diplomatic, consular, military and other. Which, of course, Abu Ghraib clearly is.

Which means all contractors working there are subject to federal criminal law if the DOJ wishes to go after them.

The other way to go after contractors using U.S. laws would be the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act [MEJA] of 2000, which extends federal criminal jurisdiction to DOD employees who are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, such as soldiers are, if the conduct by the individual would “constitute an offense punishable by imprisonment for more than one year if the conduct had been engaged within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” The main shortcoming, of course, is that it only covers DOD contractors. Phil Carter says the Abu Ghraib interrogators were on an Interior Department contractor seconded over to the Army so it’s possible MEJA doesn’t apply. But, hey, one needs MEJA only outside the “special maritime and territorial jurisdiction” of the United States -- which, as we just saw, the Patriot act apparently redefines to include U.S. military premises abroad. So they don’t need to stretch limited MEJA to charge these people.

I understand this sounds like lots of legal gobbledygook intended to fry the small potatoes. I wholeheartedly agree that this thing should go up as high up the chain of command as those torture memos. Still, I think deterrence has to be a combination of institutional safeguards and individual culpability. As responsible and guilty Bush et al might be, it’s almost always the sergeants and the lower ranking soldiers and contractors who end up carrying out these acts. The more they understand they will be held responsible -- and in fact scapegoated and hung out to try by their superiors -- the more they may reason, correctly, that the legal, smart and the moral thing to do overlaps over the long term. I mean, in some sense this is all PR but CIA employees, who were told in earlier memos that torture was okay, may be less than thrilled especially with Passaro looking possibly at 40 years:

"We take allegations of wrongdoing very seriously, and it's important to bear in mind that the C.I.A. immediately reported these allegations to the agency's inspector general and the Department of Justice," said an agency spokeswoman, Anya Guilsher. "While we cannot comment on the specifics of this case, given that it is currently before the court, the agency does not support or condone unlawful activities of any sort and has an obligation to report possible violations of the law to the appropriate authorities, which was done promptly in this case."

Here are the two really bad things about it. One is that the current state of events still shields torturers and killers from Iraqi or international law. That is unacceptable, we would not accept it here. And as I posted about recently, Bush’s legal team believes non-citizens even suspected --let alone definitely guilty-- of murder don’t have the right to a translator or access to their consulate, let alone due process.

It also brings crimes committed against U.S. nationals in U.S. military premises abroad under U.S. federal criminal jurisdiction. It’s a double double-standard. We won’t let Iraq try people who wrong Iraqis in Iraq; however, we claim the right to try Iraqis --or anyone-- who wrongs U.S. nationals in a U.S. base in Iraq or anywhere in the world.

Posted by zeynep at 01:59 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 17, 2004

The widow and the orphan

What do you say? We're sorry about your father? Please don't mind the young woman smiling and giving a thumbs up?

I was reading about the legalities of waterboarding when I came across this picture.

Posted by zeynep at 12:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 16, 2004

Lone Star Justice

Ye Gods!

The current White House chief legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, who had been widely rumored to be the next Supreme Court Nominee before authoring the latest memos arguing the president was not bound by international or domestic law, had opined in the past that the State of Texas was not bound by international treaties signed by the United States.

There goes a few hundred years of precedent along with the United States constitution, but, hey, we got to execute a Mexican national who did not speak English and who signed a murder confession thinking it was an immigration document, without a translator or lawyer present:

On June 16, 1997, [Alberto] Gonzales first showcased his proclivity for torturing international law when he sent a letter to the U.S. State Department in which he argued that, "Since the State of Texas is not a signatory to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, we believe it is inappropriate to ask Texas to determine whether a breach … occurred in connection with the arrest and conviction" of a Mexican national. Or, put another way, he asserted that an international treaty just didn't apply to Texas.

The Mexican in question, Irineo Tristan Montoya, was a fisherman convicted of brutally stabbing and murdering John Kilheffer in Brownsville, Texas, in 1985. Tristan, who insisted he was innocent, was executed two days after Gonzales sent his memo to State, despite protests from the Mexican government. Mexico alleged that Texas had violated Tristan's rights under the Vienna Convention because it had failed to inform the Mexican consulate at the time of his arrest.

The Vienna Convention, ratified by the Senate in 1969, was designed to ensure that foreign nationals accused of a crime are given access to legal counsel by a representative from their home country. In the absence of a lawyer and without access to Mexican authorities, Tristan, who neither spoke nor understood English, signed a confession that he later said he believed to be an immigration document.

I wondered if he found it odd that nobody asked for his passport when he left Texas for D.C.

Posted by zeynep at 12:20 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 15, 2004

Torture, Laws and Memos

Last week there has been a spate of leaked memos and revelations. I think all but the journalists closely covering the subject are a bit confused. I’ve certainly been overwhelmed. This weekend I spent some time trying to read and collate the memos and reports.

The short of it is this: sometime during the Afghanistan War, the administration lawyers decided that the President was authorized to set aside any and all domestic and international laws in his capacity as commander-in-chief and that underlings who were following his orders could claim immunity based on that authority, or on the “necessity,” “following orders,” or “bad legal advice” defenses.

The memos both argue that torture is legal and that, after sufficient definitional summersaults, the concept of torture doesn’t really exist. The DOD then proceeded to draw up lists of what was allowed, what was allowed with permission, and what was not allowed. The use of torture started during the Afghanistan war, continued in Guantanamo, Baghram and elsewhere, and quickly spread in Iraq where the Red Cross reported that 70 to 90 percent of the detained were swept up by mistake. The lists of allowable actions seem to have influenced the prevalence of certain acts but the message seems to have been “do whatever you have to do” -- of course, it was soon extended into “do whatever we feel like doing.”

Thus, a combination of instructions and encouragement as well as an environment of legal immunity and impunity resulted in the very predictable consequence of widespread torture, abuse and mistreatment.

The biggest surprise seems to have been the photographs:

People are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.

I would argue that this shows lack of understanding of the American society on Rumsfeld’s part, if he is genuinely surprised. We don’t exist unless filmed. And as the president recently demonstrated by insisting that he would not return Saddam Hussein’s pistol to the people of Iraq --it’s U.S. government property, he said-- our actions don’t count without some souvenirs to show back home to folks.

The authors of these memos seem to be aware that, one way or another, these acts would become known. They clearly have the possibility of future prosecutions --and how to avoid them-- foremost in their minds. As a result, the legal advice sometimes borders on the absurd:

[The Pentagon memo] lays out defenses that government officials could use should they be charged with committing torture, such as mistakenly relying in good faith on the advice of lawyers or experts that their actions were permissible

The first memo to have surfaced dates from January 9, 2002 -- it’s written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and concludes that:

"Neither the War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions" would apply to the detention conditions of Al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. The memo includes a lengthy discussion of the War Crimes Act, which it concludes has no binding effect on the president because it would interfere with his Commander in Chief powers to determine "how best to deploy troops in the field." (The memo, by Justice lawyers John Yoo and Robert Delahunty, also concludes—in response to a question by the Pentagon—that U.S. soldiers could not be tried for violations of the laws of war in Afghanistan because such international laws have "no binding legal effect on either the President or the military.")

Note that it argues that even U.S. laws, such as the War Crimes Act, “have no binding effect on the president.” All hail the king.

A few weeks later, on January 25, 2002 White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, widely rumored to be a future Supreme Court Justice nominee, wrote a four page memo to the president arguing the pros and cons of applying the third Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War (GPW) to Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. One of the main reasons for not applying the GPW, Gonzales argues, is that this “substantially reduced the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441).” Note that this is a domestic law enacted in 1996, prohibiting the “commission of a war crime by or against a U.S. person, including U.S. officials.” War crimes were defined as grave breach of the GPW or any violation of “common article 3” -- such as “outrages against personal dignity.”

Gonzales’ curious reasoning was that if we decree that GPW does not apply then we cannot be prosecuted for violating the GPW.

Later, Gonzales ridiculed the idea that his memo and the treatment of Iraqi prisoners could be linked: “If you were to ask soldiers in the field if they ever heard of my draft memo,” [Gonzales] said, “they would have said, ‘What?’”

Moving along, on August of 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad ‘may be justified,’ and that international laws against torture ‘may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations’ conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism. The memo was written by the Justice Department's office of legal counsel in response to a CIA request for legal guidance. The memo argued that “arguments centering on ‘necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability’ later. This memo also continues the chain of tortured arguments about what was not torture. For something to be torture, the memo argued it “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

The Post which published the memo quoted expert who noted that this is, of course, in contradiction with all existing interpretations international and domestic law as well as Army’s own guidelines:

By contrast, the Army's Field Manual 34-52, titled "Intelligence Interrogations," sets more restrictive rules. For example, the Army prohibits pain induced by chemicals or bondage; forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time; and food deprivation. Under mental torture, the Army prohibits mock executions, sleep deprivation and chemically induced psychosis.

Of course, we know that some prisoners were indeed killed by torture in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

That memo also defines away “mental torture”:

Of mental torture, however, an interrogator could show he acted in good faith by "taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts or reviewing evidence gained in past experience" to show he or she did not intend to cause severe mental pain and that the conduct, therefore, "would not amount to the acts prohibited by the statute."

Then, on March 2003, the Pentagon drafted a memo which was based on the reasoning of the earlier Justice Dept. memos -- this one was obtained by the Wall Street Journal. Here’s some excerpts from the WSJ article:

Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."

A military lawyer who helped prepare the report said that political appointees heading the working group sought to assign to the president virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture -- to assert "presidential power at its absolute apex," the lawyer said.

We also know that the highest level officer who we know directly ordered torture is Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who was the commander of the ‘multinational’ forces in Iraq:

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.”

Sanchez had earlier denied authorizing such methods, during his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee:

SEN. MARK DAYTON (D), MINNESOTA: Then the police were to put a hood on his head and take him to an isolated cell through a gauntlet of barking dogs. There the police were to strip-search him and interrupt his sleep for three days with interrogations, barking and loud music, according to Army documents.

The plan was sent to you -- is that one of the 25 requests for additional interrogation techniques that you approved?

LT. GEN. RICARDO SANCHEZ, COMMANDER, MULTINATIONAL FORCE-IRAQ:: Sir, first of all, you stated that I issued an order that I specifically put key cell blocks under Colonel Pappas. I never issued such an order.

DAYTON: OK, and...

SANCHEZ: Secondly...

DAYTON: The article's incorrect? That I...

SANCHEZ: Sir, I never issued such an order.

DAYTON: I regret the...

SANCHEZ: And secondly, that request never made it to my headquarters -- or to me, personally, rather.

DAYTON: So there wasn't memo on November 19th, to place -- from your office -- to place these cell blocks under Colonel Pappas?

SANCHEZ: No, sir, I never issued such an order.

DAYTON: All right.

SANCHEZ: And that specific request for interrogation methods -- that never...

DAYTON: Let me see that one.

SANCHEZ: ... never got to the CJTF-7 commanding general's level, and I never approved any interrogation methods other than continued segregation.

DAYTON: Thank you.

And currently, the official line of denial seems to be that we decreed these acts to be legal and that’s that. In fact, President Bush has been pointedly refusing to directly condemn torture and, sounding very briefed, he has been invoking the “it’s all legal 'cause we said so” defense whenever pushed:

Q: What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

BUSH: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government.

Somehow, I'm less than comforted.

Posted by zeynep at 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 14, 2004

We didn't know!

We didn't know. We are shocked, shocked.

Except Red Cross, Amnesty International, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Human Rights Watch, many journalists, eyewitnesses and our own interrogators told us about it, starting at least year ago or so.

That's right. Even a small group of interrogators at Abu Ghraib had been reporting that prisoners were being "abused" in internal documents "sent to senior officials last November."

Posted by zeynep at 12:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How Do You Spell Colonialism?

Monday's Washington Post reports that the United States is asking that foreign contractors, some of whom shoot, detain or kill people in their capacity as mercenaries, remain above law. Some are already implicated in Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the jobs they undertake are no means small or trivial -- even security for Bremer is provided by these armed private groups.

In an early test of its imminent sovereignty, Iraq's new government has been resisting a U.S. demand that thousands of foreign contractors here be granted immunity from Iraqi law, in the same way as U.S. military forces are now immune, according to Iraqi sources. ...

If accepted by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, it would put the highly visible U.S. foreign contractors into a special legal category, not subject to military justice and beyond the reach of Iraq's justice system.

Again, they would not even be subject to the U.S. military code which, however imperfect, at least provides for a trial. Some of the punishments have been ridiculous --like a year in prison and a dishonorable discharge for participating in torture for Spc Jeremy Sivits-- and nobody who actually has any rank, let alone the highest levels of government who are clearly implicated, seems likely to ever face a trial. However, I believe that even the knowledge that someday, somewhere, one could be tried is a world of difference from being promised full immunity no matter what you do; kill, rape, torture, steal, etc. Which is the environment that mercenaries have been operating until now and if