Raid May Herald More Confrontational Policy

by Daniel Luban

WASHINGTON - An apparent raid into Pakistani territory by U.S. forces stationed in Afghanistan has prompted angry denunciations from Pakistani officials and renewed questions about the future of the war against the Taliban in the region.

Pakistani activists watch a burning US flag during a protest in Lahore. (AFP Photo)The raid, which took place Wednesday morning in the turbulent Waziristan region, may have killed as many as 20 civilians, according to witnesses and Pakistani officials.

After months in which U.S. military officials have expressed concerns about the Pakistani government's willingness to crack down on Taliban militants operating in its tribal areas, news of the raid has caused speculation about whether the U.S. is planning to take on a more aggressive role in targeting militants in Pakistani territory, and worries about what such a step would mean for the volatile U.S.-Pakistan relationship.

According to sources in the Pakistani military and civilian government, the raid began around 3 a.m. Wednesday morning, when three helicopters carrying U.S. and Afghan troops flew into the Warizistan village of Jala Khel.

Some troops then disembarked, witnesses say, and opened fire upon villagers.

The New York Times reported that the soldiers involved were U.S. Special Operations forces operating outside of the normal NATO chain of command.

According to Owais Ahmed Ghani, the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, over 20 people were killed in the raid. Ghani condemned the action as a "direct assault on Pakistan's sovereignty" and called for retaliation.

Other Pakistani officials were also quick to condemn the raid. Nadeem Kiani, spokesman for the Pakistani embassy in Washington, told Reuters that the U.S. forces were acting on faulty intelligence that had not been shared with Pakistan, and that those killed were unarmed civilians rather than militants.

U.S. and NATO spokesmen in Afghanistan, as well as a spokesman at U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida, declined to comment. But U.S. officials did anonymously confirm that the raid had occurred, with one official telling the New York Times that at least one child had been killed.

The raid came after a long period of friction between U.S. military officials and their Pakistani counterparts, as the U.S. has chafed at Pakistan's apparent reluctance to rein in the Taliban.

Since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 overthrew that country's Taliban government, the Taliban, al Qaeda, and other militants have found sanctuary in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan, in which the central government exercises little control.

A September 2006 agreement legitimised Taliban power in the Waziristan region of the FATA, and militants have used the region as a staging post for attacks into Afghanistan.

U.S. worries only increased following the resignation in August of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, considered by Washington to be a key ally in the war on terror. Elections to choose Musharraf's successor will be held Sep. 6, but U.S. officials appear to have considerably less confidence in Asif Ali Zardari of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), who is the heavy favourite in the elections.

Questions also swirl about whether Pakistan's incoming civilian government will be able to exert control over the military, which has traditionally been highly autonomous, and the country's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI).

In a move that appeared designed to win U.S. confidence, the Pakistani military launched an airpower offensive against the Taliban in the Bajaur region of the tribal areas in August. The campaign has been credited with killing hundreds of Taliban, but has also displaced an estimated 200,000 civilians, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. This past week, the government declared that it would halt the campaign during the month of Ramadan.

The Taliban retaliated for the government offensive with an Aug. 21 suicide bombing at an arms factory outside Islamabad that killed over 60 people.

This past summer, U.S. officials have begun to confront Pakistan more openly over the militants issue. In July, a CIA official traveled to Islamabad with evidence linking the ISI to the Jul. 7 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

In late August, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, chief of staff of the Pakistani Army, aboard an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean to discuss strategies for reining in militants in the tribal areas.

Several other prominent U.S. and NATO military officials were present at the meeting, including Gen. David Petraeus, currently the top U.S. commander in Iraq and soon to become head of CENTCOM -- the military command overseeing Pakistan and Afghanistan.

U.S. officials told the New York Times that potential unilateral U.S. operations within the tribal areas were not discussed at the meeting. But other officials suggested to the Times that Wednesday's raid was not a mistake or aberration, but rather the product of a concerted decision within the U.S. military hierarchy.

"There's potential to see more [such operations]", one official told the Times.

On Aug. 23, the Los Angeles Times reported that top U.S. military officials have been resistant to the idea of direct military operations in Pakistan, preferring to send trainers to work with the Pakistani military. CIA counter-terrorism officials, on the other hand, have been the primary advocates of direct operations.

Wednesday's raid, however, may signal that that dynamic has shifted, and that the military brass has been convinced of the necessity of direct military intervention.

If the raid does in fact mark the beginning of a new U.S. policy in the tribal areas, it is expected to considerably complicate U.S. relations with the Pakistani government.

C. Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the RAND Corporation, suggested that the raid did mark a policy shift, and cautioned about the potential consequences of the new strategy.

"Without integrating these attacks within a wider Pakistan strategy -- which the U.S. government does not have -- we risk a serious blowback which could make things worse, not better," Fair told IPS. "Ninety percent of our logistics still move through Karachi port, so attacking Pakistani targets when we are still dependent on them makes little sense."

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer now at the Brookings Institution, argued last month that the U.S. should be willing to use force against "very high value targets" in Pakistan, but cautioned against "loose talk about larger military options".

"The notion of moving NATO forces into the FATA is crazy," Riedel said at a Brookings panel. "We will only spread the cancer deeper into Pakistan...Talk about these issues is extraordinarily counterproductive. It only feeds the paranoia and conspiracy theories of the Pakistani political milieu".

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Why Its Iraqi "Client" Blocked US Long-Term Presence

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signaled last week that that all U.S. troops -- including those with non-combat functions -- must be out of the country by the end of 2011 under the agreement he is negotiating with the George W. Bush administration.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, seen in Baghdad on August 10. Al-Maliki declared Aug. 25 that the U.S. had agreed that "no foreign soldiers will be in Iraq after 2011". A Shiite legislator and al-Maliki ally, Ali al-Adeeb, told the Washington Post that only the Iraqi government had the authority under the agreement to decide whether conditions were conducive to a complete withdrawal. He added that the Iraqi government "could ask the Americans to withdraw before 2011 if we wish."
(AFP/IPMO/File)That pronouncement, along with other moves indicating that the Iraqi position was hardening rather than preparing for a compromise, appeared to doom the Bush administration's plan to leave tens of thousands of military support personnel in Iraq indefinitely. The new Iraqi moves raise the obvious question of how a leader who was considered a safe U.S. client could have defied his patron on such a central U.S. strategic interest.

Al-Maliki declared Aug. 25 that the U.S. had agreed that "no foreign soldiers will be in Iraq after 2011". A Shiite legislator and al-Maliki ally, Ali al-Adeeb, told the Washington Post that only the Iraqi government had the authority under the agreement to decide whether conditions were conducive to a complete withdrawal. He added that the Iraqi government "could ask the Americans to withdraw before 2011 if we wish."

It was also reported that al-Maliki has replaced his negotiating team with three of his closest advisers.

These moves blindsided the Bush administration, which had been telling reporters that a favourable agreement was close. The Washington Post reported Aug. 22 and again Aug. 26 that the agreement on withdrawal would be "conditions-based" and would allow the United States to keep tens of thousands of non-combat troops in the country after 2011.

The administration had assumed going into the negotiations that al-Maliki would remain a U.S. client for a few years, because of the Iraqi government's dependence on the U.S. military to build a largely Shiite Iraqi army and police force and defeat the main insurgent threats to his regime.

But that dependence has diminished dramatically over the past two years as Iraqi security forces continued to grow, the Sunni insurgents found refuge under U.S. auspices and the Shiites succeeded in largely eliminating Sunni political-military power from the Baghdad area. As a result, the inherent conflicts between U.S. interests and those of the Shiite regime have been become more evident.

Contrary to the administration's claims that it was helping the regime remain independent of Iran, al-Maliki was far closer to Tehran than to Washington from the beginning. As a team of McClatchy newspaper reporters revealed last April, the choice of al-Maliki as prime minister was the direct result of the mediation by Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force, in the negotiations within the coalition that had won the December 2005 parliamentary election.

Washington didn't learn that Suleimani had slipped into the green zone until later, according to the McClatchy report.

Al-Maliki has hardly hidden his opposition to U.S. ambitions to maintain a major long-term role in Iraq. One of his first moves was to propose negotiating a timetable for complete U.S. withdrawal with the Sunni insurgents. He soon clashed with U.S. officials over their determination to launch a campaign against Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. Sadr had been a key political ally of al-Maliki, and the Mahdi Army was an important asset in a broader Shiite campaign to eliminate Sunni political-military power in Baghdad.

The Iraqi leader angered U.S. officials in late October 2006 by intervening to call off a U.S.-Iraqi cordon and search operation against the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. When Bush met with al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan on Nov. 30, 2006, to discuss a possible U.S. troop increase, he had hoped to get approval for U.S. troops to occupy Sadr City. As Michael Gordon revealed in his Aug. 31 account of Bush policymaking on the surge, however, al-Maliki told Bush he wanted U.S. troops to stay out of the centre of the capital.

In the end, al-Maliki and the U.S. command reached a compromise on a carefully conditioned U.S. occupation of Sadr City. But al-Maliki continued to maintain ties with the Sadrists.

In 2007, Gen. David Petraeus's project to form Sunni militias, mostly from former armed resistance veterans, became a new source of tension between the Bush administration and al-Maliki. An associate of al-Maliki told Associated Press in July 2007 that he once threatened in a discussion with President Bush to counter the arming of Sunnis by arming Shiite militias. The Iraqi leader halted progress on political concessions to the Sunni community.

As the U.S. command turned its attention increasingly to attacking the Mahdi Army, the Bush administration began talking in June 2007 about a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq, based on the "Korean model". Al-Maliki's responded by declaring that U.S. troops should leave and turn over security to Iraqi forces.

In August, Bush publicly distanced himself from al-Maliki, apparently hoping he would be replaced by a more cooperative figure.

In late August, the Sadrists were fighting against both U.S. troops in Baghdad and security forces loyal to the pro-Iranian Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council in the south. With al-Maliki's obvious encouragement, Iran intervened to arrange the first of a series of accommodations between its Iraqi clients and Sadr. On Aug. 26, 2007 the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, asked why nothing had been done to arrange "reconciliation" between the two Iraqi groups, said Iran "always used its influence to create unity between the different groups in Iraq".

Three days later, Sadr announced a unilateral ceasefire. The main beneficiary of the ceasefire, which ended attacks on the green zone and intra-Shiite fighting, was the al-Maliki regime, and Iraqi officials credited Iranian policy for having made it happen.

The Mar. 7 U.S. draft of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and the U.S. military drive in Shiite territory brought the conflict of interests between the al-Maliki regime and the Bush administration to a head in 2008. In mid-March, Al-Maliki rejected a Petraeus plan for a massive joint operation against the Sadrists in Basra, which would have increased Iraqi dependence on U.S. troops.

Instead, al-Maliki launched his own operation in Basra that was planned to last only a few days. Then, in a move that appears to have been prearranged with Suleimani, Iraqi officials were dispatched to Iran to get Suleimani's help in mediating a peace agreement with Sadr.

The result was a Sadrist retreat from Basra, even though Iraqi security forces had not been able to cope with the Mahdi Army resistance. That headed off a major U.S. troop presence in the Shiite south and strengthened al-Maliki's position in negotiations with Washington.

The Basra agreement set the stage for the subsequent accord between al-Maliki and Sadr, again reached with Iranian mediation, for a ceasefire in Sadr City on May 12. The agreement prevented the U.S. command from getting the large-scale U.S. campaign in Sadr City for which it had been pushing for more than a year.

The carefully calculating Sadr had been convinced to trade short-term military success for the prospect of a U.S. military retreat.

Al-Maliki began pushing for "significant changes" in the SOFA only after the May agreement, but he was only returning to the position he had embraced two years earlier.

This al-Maliki record of opposition to U.S. political-military interests apparently failed to shake the Bush administration's belief that he would yield to U.S. demands in the end. That faith appears to reflect the official military triumphalism associated with Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy -- a residual faith in the power of the U.S. military's presence in Iraq to sweep away all local obstacles to U.S. victory.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

A Really Bad Couple of Weeks for Pax Americana

by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Whatever hopes the George W. Bush administration may have had for using its post-9/11 “war on terror” to impose a new Pax Americana on Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, appear to have gone up in flames — in some cases, literally — over the past two weeks.
Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial parts of Georgia after Washington’s favourite Caucasian, President Mikhail Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive against secessionist South Ossetians.But bloody attacks in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, about 1,000 kms to the east also underlined the seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly beleaguered and befuddled U.S.-backed governments.

And while U.S. negotiators appear to have made progress in hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that will permit U.S. combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for another year and a half, signs that the Shi’a-dominated government of President Nouri al-Maliki may be preparing to move forcefully against the U.S.-backed, predominantly Sunni ”Awakening” movement has raised the spectre of renewed sectarian civil war.

Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears to have vanished, while efforts at mobilising greater international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment programme — the administration’s top priority before the Georgia crisis — have stalled indefinitely, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighbourhood.

”The list of foreign policy failures this week is breathtaking,” noted a statement released Friday by the National Security Network (NSN), a mainstream group of former high-ranking officials critical of the Bush administration’s more-aggressive policies. And a prominent New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, argued that the Russian move on Georgia, in particular, signaled ”the end of the Pax Americana — the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force.”

Indeed, Russia’s intervention in what it used to call its ”near abroad” was clearly the most spectacular of the fortnight’s developments, both because of its unprecedented use of overwhelming military force against a U.S. ally heavily promoted by Washington for membership in NATO and because of the geo-strategic implications of its move for the increasingly-troubled Atlantic alliance and U.S. hopes that Caspian and Central Asian energy resources could be safely transported to the West without transiting either Russia or Iran.

While Russia did not seize control of the Baku-Tbili-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline or approach the area proposed for the Nabucco pipeline further south, its intervention made it abundantly clear that it could have done so if it had wished, a message that is certain to reverberate across gas-hungry Europe. Indeed, investors now may prove considerably less enthusiastic about financing the Nabucco project than before, dealing yet another blow to Washington’s regional ambitions.

Russia’s move also raised new questions about its willingness to tolerate the continued use by the U.S. and other NATO countries of key air bases and other military facilities in the southern part of the former Soviet Union, notably Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, over which Moscow maintains substantial influence.

As with Georgia, where the U.S. significantly escalated its military presence by sending over Russian protests 200 Special Forces troops in early 2002, Washington first acquired access to these bases under the pretext of its post-9/11 ”global war on terrorism”. But, while clearly important to its subsequent operations on Afghanistan, they were also seen as key building blocks — or ”lily pads” — in the construction of a permanent military infrastructure that could both contain a resurgent Russia or an emergent China and help establish U.S. hegemony over the energy resources of Central Asia and the Caspian region in what its architects hoped would be a ”New American Century.”

As suggested by former Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani this week, Washington and, to some extent, NATO behind it, ”has intruded into the geopolitical spaces of other dormant countries. They are no longer dormant…”

Indeed, still badly bogged down in Iraq where, despite the much-reduced level of sectarian violence, political reconciliation remains elusive, to say the least, the U.S. and its overly deferential NATO allies now face unprecedented challenges in Afghanistan not entirely unfamiliar to the Soviets 20 years ago.

”The news out of Afghanistan is truly alarming,” warned Thursday’s lead editorial in the New York Times, which noted the killings of 10 French paratroopers near Kabul in an ambush earlier in the week — the single worst combat death toll for NATO forces in the war there — as well as the coordinated assault by suicide bombers on one of the biggest U.S. military bases there as indications of an increasingly dire situation. In the last three months, more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

”Afghanistan badly needs reinforcements. Badly,” wrote ret. Col. Pat Lang, a former top Middle East and South Asia expert at the Defence Intelligence Agency on his blog this week. ”Afghanistan badly needs a serious infrastructure and economic development programme. Badly.”

Of course, the Taliban’s resurgence has in no small part been due to the safe haven it has been provided next door in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where Pakistan’s own Taliban, which also hosts a rejuvenating al Qaeda, has not only tightened its hold on the region in recent months but extended it into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Last week, it retaliated in spectacular fashion to airborne attacks on its forces by the U.S.-backed military in Bajaur close to the Khyber Pass — the most important supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan — by carrying out suicide bombings at a heavily guarded munitions factory that killed nearly 70 people near Islamabad.

Analysts here are especially worried that, having achieved the resignation last week of U.S.-backed former President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the new civilian government will likely tear itself apart over the succession and the growing economic crisis and thus prove completely ineffective in dealing with Washington’s top priority — confronting and defeating the Taliban in a major counter-insurgency effort for which the army, long focused on the conventional threat posed by India, has shown no interest at all.

Indeed, the current leadership vacuum in Islamabad has greatly compounded concern here that the army’s intelligence service ISI, which Washington believes played a role in last month’s deadly Taliban attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, could broaden its anti-Indian efforts. This is especially so now that Indian Kashmir is once again hotting up, ensuring a sharp escalation in the two nuclear-armed countries’ decades-long rivalry and threatening in yet another way the post-Cold War Pax Americana.

Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service.

Bush Covered Up Musharraf Ties with Qaeda, Khan

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation Monday brings to an end an extraordinarily close relationship between Musharraf and the George W. Bush administration, in which Musharraf was lavished with political and economic benefits from the United States despite policies that were in sharp conflict with U.S. security interests.

It is well known that Bush repeatedly praised Musharraf as the most loyal ally of the United States against terrorism, even though the Pakistani military was deeply compromised by its relationship with the Taliban and Pakistani Islamic militants.

What has not been reported is that the Bush administration covered up the Musharraf regime’s involvement in the activities of the A. Q. Khan nuclear technology export programme and its deals with al Qaeda’s Pakistani tribal allies.

The problem faced by the Bush administration when it came into office was that the Pakistani military, over which Musharraf presided, was the real terrorist nexus with the Taliban and al Qaeda. As Bruce Riedel, National Security Council (NSC) senior director for South Asia in the Bill Clinton administration, who stayed on the NSC staff under the Bush administration, observed in an interview with this writer last September, al Qaeda “was a creation of the jihadist culture of the Pakistani army”.

If there was a state sponsor of al Qaeda, Riedel said, it was the Pakistani military, acting through its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate.

Vice President Dick Cheney and the neoconservative-dominated Bush Pentagon were aware of the intimate relationship between Musharraf’s regime and both the Taliban and al Qaeda. But al Qaeda was not a high priority for the Bush administration.

After 9/11, the White House created the political myth that Musharraf, faced with a clear choice, had “joined the free world in fighting the terrorists”. But as Asia expert Selig S. Harrison has pointed out, on Sep. 19, 2001, just six days after he had supposedly agreed to U.S. demands for cooperation against the Taliban regime and al Qaeda, Musharraf gave a televised speech in Urdu in which he declared, “We are trying our best to come out of this critical situation without any damage to Afghanistan and the Taliban.”

In his memoirs, published in 2006, Musharraf revealed the seven specific demands he had been given and claimed that he had refused both “blanket overflight and landing rights” and the use of Pakistan’s naval ports and air bases to conduct anti-terrorism operations.

Musharraf also famously wrote that, immediately after 9/11, Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage had threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” if Musharraf didn’t side with the United States against bin Laden and his Afghan hosts. But Armitage categorically denied to this writer, through his assistant, Kara Bue, that he had made any threat whatsoever, let alone a threat to retaliate militarily against Pakistan.

For the next few years, Musharraf played a complicated game. The CIA was allowed to operate in Pakistan’s border provinces to pursue al Qaeda operatives, but only as long as they had ISI units accompanying them. That restricted their ability to gather intelligence in the northwest frontier. At the same time, ISI was allowing Taliban and al Qaeda leaders to operate freely in the tribal areas and even in Karachi.

The Bush administration also gave Musharraf and the military regime a free ride on the A. Q. Khan network’s selling of nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, even though there was plenty of evidence that the generals had been fully aware of and supported Khan’s activities.

Journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins wrote in their book “The Nuclear Jihadist” that one retired general who had worked with Khan told them there was no question that Khan had acted with the full knowledge of the military leadership. “Of course the military knew,” the general said. “They helped him.”

But the Bush administration chose to help Musharraf cover up that inconvenient fact. According to CIA Director George Tenet’s memoirs, in September 2003, he confronted Musharraf with the evidence the CIA had gathered on Khan’s operation and made it clear he was expected to end its operations and arrest Khan.

The following January and early February, Khan’s house arrest, public confession of guilt and pardon by Musharraf was accompanied by an extraordinary series of statements by high-ranking Bush administration officials exonerating Musharraf and the military of any involvement in Khan’s activities.

That whole scenario had been “carefully orchestrated with Musharraf”, Larry Wilkerson, then a State Department official but later Colin Powell’s chief of staff, told IPS in an interview last year. The deal that had been made did not require Musharraf to allow U.S. officials to interrogate Khan.

But the Bush administration apparently conveyed to the Pakistani military after that episode that it now expected the Musharraf regime to deliver high-ranking al Qaeda officials — and to do so at a particularly advantageous moment for the administration. The New Republic magazine reported Jul. 15, 2004 that a White House aide had told the visiting head of ISI, Ehsan ul-Haq, that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of any HVT [high value target] were announced on 26, 27 or 28 July.” Those were the last three days of the Democratic National Convention.

The military source added, “If we don’t find these guys by the election, they are going to stick the whole nuclear mess up our a**hole.”

Just hours before Democratic candidate John Kerry’s acceptance speech, Pakistan announced the capture of an alleged al Qaeda leader.

Meanwhile, Musharraf was making a political pact with a five-party Islamic alliance in 2004 to ensure victory in state elections in the two border provinces where Islamic extremist influence was strongest. This explicit political accommodation, followed by a military withdrawal from South Waziristan, gave the pro-Taliban forces allied with al Qaeda in the region a free hand to recruit and train militants for war in Afghanistan.

Yet another deal with the Islamic extremists in 2006 strengthened the pro-Taliban forces even further.

But Bush chose to reward Musharraf by designating Pakistan a “Major Non-NATO Ally” in 2004 and by agreeing to sell the Pakistani Air Force 36 advanced F-16 fighter planes. Prior to that, Pakistan had been denied U.S. military technology for a decade.

In July 2007, a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that al Qaeda’s new “safe haven” was in Pakistan’s tribal areas and that the terrorist organisation had reconstituted its “homeland attack capability” there. That estimate ended the fiction that the Musharraf regime was firmly committed to combating al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Had the Bush administration accurately portrayed Musharraf’s policies rather than hiding them, it would not have avoided the al Qaeda safe haven there. But it would have facilitated a more realistic debate about the real options available for U.S. policy.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in June 2005.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Mystery Behind Aafia Siddiqi’s ‘Arrest’ Deepens

by Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI - ‘’For you it’s just another story. If you want the truth go to Ghazni where you will get more than I can ever tell you about my sister,” said a distraught Fouzia Siddiqi, speaking with IPS, in a voice breaking with helpless desperation.

Fouzia’s younger sister, Aafia Siddiqi, 35, made headlines after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced, on Aug. 4, her “arrest” for attempting to “murder and assault” United States’ officers and employees outside the governor’s office in Ghazni, Afghanistan, on Jul. 17. No soldiers were reported injured in the incident but Aafia received bullet injuries.

Aafia, a neuroscientist, has since been lodged in a Manhattan jail and the preliminary hearing of her case set for Sep. 3. According to charges framed against her in a New York court, she was, at the time of her arrest, found carrying documents describing how to make explosives and chemical, biological and radiological weapons. She, allegedly, also had a list of landmarks in the U.S. and ‘’chemical substances” in sealed containers.

Aafia’s resurfacing in Ghazni, five years after her disappearance in the southern port city of Karachi, has shaken the nation. The whereabouts of her three children, who were with her at the time she was kidnapped, remain unclear.

Aafia’s story began in March 2003 when this Pakistani woman, then 30, along with her three children, then aged between four months and seven years, became one more victim of numerous disappearances that have been linked to Pakistan’s role in the U.S.-led ‘war-on-terror’. The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has stated that she was initially picked up by an intelligence agency in Pakistan and so the “Pakistan government is also accountable for the crime”.

The handing over of Aafia to U.S. authorities has been criticised by Pakistani political leaders. “This is not only a heinous act, but tantamount to selling the country’s sovereignty and independence to another nation. It is shameful, utterly humiliating to every Pakistani,” said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, leader of the Jamaat -e-Islami party at a press conference here last week.

“It is high time that the present government act like an independent sovereign nation and form its own foreign policy leaving behind the legacy of a discredited military dictator,” Ahmed stressed, referring Pervez Musharraf who resigned as president on Monday, amid criticism at home of his pro-U.S. policies.

In 2004, then FBI director Robert Mueller named Aafia among the seven al-Qaeda associates who were being sought in connection with possible terrorist threats to the U.S.

Two weeks prior to Aafia’s arrest in Ghazni, a British journalist, Yvonne Ridley, held a press conference in Islamabad, in which she identified Aafia as ‘Prisoner No. 650′, being held in solitary confinement at the detention centre attached to the U.S. air base at Bagram.

Ridley referred to the book ‘Enemy Combatant’ by Moazzam Beg, a former Guantanamo and Bagram prisoner, who had mentioned hearing endless screams, apparently by a woman being tortured, during his detention at Bagram.

“Based on the testimony of detainees held in Bagram in 2003 and 2004, it is clear that there was a woman being held at the base. Whether or not that woman was Aafia Siddiqi is something that, at the moment, cannot be verified,” said Asim Qureshi, senior researcher with the rights group Cageprisoners. “However, Dr. Siddiqi has confirmed that she was held in Bagram for years,” said Qureshi, responding to queries from IPS.

Fouzia describes her sister, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University alumna, as a ‘’fun-loving people’s person,” who had completed her PhD on “how to improve memory among mentally challenged children”.

“I fear for her life. They probably don’t want her to see the light of day,” said Fouzia. ‘’If they release her, the truth will come out.”

A press release by the HRCP says: “A close look at the picture (in newspapers here) shows the years of torture — dark circles under her eyes, a broken and badly fixed nose, made up teeth and crumbled lips. It is a picture of a severely dehydrated and unwell person, almost as if on the deathbed. It shows the inhumane brutality of a ‘civilised’ nation by the administration of the country which claims to be civilised.”

According to the description given to Fouzia given by her brother, a Houston-based architect, who was allowed to meet Aafia in New York, she was in a ‘’fragile condition and in severe pain”.

“She was suffering from multiple bullet wounds that had been not been attended to. She came to court in a wheelchair and was suffering from intense abdominal pain for which she was given aspirin, which could only act as poison for her ulcerous condition,” Fouzia said. Aafia had earlier informed her lawyer that she believed part of her intestines had been removed.

“My brother told me he saw the perpetrators and the victim together in one room. There was not a shred of compassion, just stony-eyed hate,” Fouzia said, tears welling up in her eyes. “She has been condemned even before the trial.”

“You know, it would have been better if she had died. I believed she had died and was reconciled to the idea. That way I could move on… and then she re-surfaced, like resurrected from the dead, and that brought some hope. But seeing her like this, it just breaks my heart,” continued Fouzia.

Since the announcement of her arrest there have been protests from rights groups across Pakistan.

Amina Janjua, who has been leading a campaign for the recovery of almost 400 missing persons, as chairperson of Defence of the Human Rights, formed after her husband was kidnapped three years ago said she could feel the anguish and utter helplessness of Aafia’s family.

“After seeing Aafia’s pictures splashed in newspapers across the country and the torture marks she bore for five years, I fear for my husband’s life too,” Janjua said. ” But being a woman, and a mother whose children have been separated from her, I can feel the torment she’s going through.”

“To say that she (Aafia) had been taken into custody only on Jul. 17, 2008 is a blatant lie, as transparently ugly as any falsehood can be. The insinuation, that she had been hiding herself since 2003, is a travesty of truth, an affront to people’s commonsense,” stated HRCP.

But Aafia’s case seems to be shrouded in mystery and no one is able to piece together the puzzle of her disappearance and reappearance. This has made it difficult for rights groups to bring up her case.

Her sister refuses to divulge information about her husband. And if there is a husband, he has not made any statement so far.

U.S. officials have said that she was married a second time to a nephew of Sep. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM). This has been fiercely disputed by the HRCP.

Zaid Hamid, a defence consultant, heading an Islamabad-based think tank ‘Brasstacks’, does not see any mystery about Aafia’s case except for the ‘’criminal betrayals and the deafening silence of our government, media and civil society about all Guantanamo prisoners, especially Pakistanis.”

“We consider Dr. Aafia’s case an instance of utterly unconscionable and most brutal form of attack on a human being’s individual rights,” says I.A. Rehman, heading the HRCP.

Asked why the commission was silent all these years, Rehman said: “The HRCP had been calling for her recovery since 2003 and when it went to the Supreme Court in 2007 her name was high on the list. The only mystery was the silence of Aafia’s family.”

But the silence, explains Hamid, is due to the threats faced by families in similar circumstance. This was confirmed by Fouzia who said “all these years we were told by various government people that she was alright and is well and not to probe too much or harm would come to her”.

In 2005, Arifa, 18, and her sister Habiba, 20, belonging to Karachi, were arrested from the northern Pakistani town of Swat. Their father, Sher Mohammad Baloch, filed a petition in the High Court and the HRCP took up their case. They were released after a year but HRCP was told by their father that their lips were sealed.

The government, under intense pressure from an incensed nation, has sought consular access to Aafia. As a first active step, two diplomats have visited Siddiqi and the media reported that she has requested a copy of the Quran, religiously appropriate food, and assurances of a fair trial.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Escaping The Poverty Trap

by Mercedes Sayagues

PRETORIA - What do they have in common — the landless widow with a deaf son in Bangladesh, the 12-year-old miner in Kyrgyzstan, the Ugandan farming couple with 12 children and the South African domestic worker who loses her home when her husband dies and her job when she breaks a leg? They, and their children, are trapped in chronic poverty, even as their countries show economic growth.

Worldwide, between 320 and 440 million people live in chronic poverty. They need not. Five policy measures could help them escape the poverty trap, says the second international Chronic Poverty Report 2008-2009, launched in London last month.

The report was produced by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC), a global partnership of universities, research institutions and NGOs from countries including Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Uganda and the UK, and is funded by the UK government’s department for international development. The centre is led by the University of Manchester, UK and the UK’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

It intersperses these personal stories with analysis, and identifies five factors which underlie poverty: insecurity, limited citizenship, spatial distribution, social discrimination and poor work opportunities.

The solutions to these ‘poverty traps’ include nets of social protection, particularly through cash transfers to households; public services for the hard to reach poor; anti-discrimination and gender empowerment measures; building individual and collective assets, and strategic urbanization and migration policies.

Perhaps the report’s most interesting proposal is to expand welfare systems to guarantee the chronically poor a basic income, both as their right and as a way out of poverty. The experiences of Brazil, Chile, India and South Africa show that social transfers in cash or in kind reduce vulnerability, allow the poor to engage in more productive economic activities, and are generally judiciously spent.

According to the researchers, social protection is affordable and can be scaled up even in relatively poor countries, as Bangladesh and Uganda have shown.

However, governments often have questions about creating dependency and the long-term financial commitments required. Gaining a constituency for social protection is key, says the report, and it calls on world leaders to commit to the drawing up of a Global Social Protection Strategy by 2010 to target the eradication of extreme poverty by 2025. This strategy would build on the Millennium Development Goals of halving poverty by 2015.

Controversially, the report notes that some governments that have effectively responded to poverty — Ethiopia, Uganda and Vietnam — are not wholly democratic. Democracy alone does not guarantee pro-poor policies, says the report. Some ‘elite projects’ (a polite term for mildly authoritarian regimes) have forged a social compact between citizens and the state that placed chronic poverty seriously on the policy agenda. Policy-makers must get “thinking beyond the contemporary mantra of democracy, elections and decentralization”.

What this means, CPRC director Andrew Shepherd told IPS, is that there is sometimes “a tension at the international level between promoting poverty reduction … and promoting competitive multi-party democracy.”

“In many cases democracies produce governments which are very effective in reducing poverty — witness recent experience in Brazil, for example,” he added.

“There are less democratic regimes which have been and are very effective in reducing poverty, and the international community needs to recognise that part of this effectiveness may be due to the nature of the regime, where a strong connection between regime and citizens has been forged through a popular movement, which generates a ’social compact’ between elite and the poor as part of a national development ‘project’.

“China and Vietnam would also be examples, and there are others during the last 60 years. The implication for the international community would be to exercise caution in attaching political conditionalities to aid or other international negotiations. Of course this does not mean that in extreme cases (eg Zimbabwe) the international community should not take a strong political position.”

Duncan Green, head of research at the British charity Oxfam, finds this analysis “courageous”. He adds: “We need to talk about this. Especially after traumatic events, autocracies may do nation-building more effectively than elected governments. There is more to politics than ballot-counting.”

Only a few ‘elite projects’ are so considerate. In mineral-rich countries, like Sudan, Myanmar, Angola, and Congo (Brazzaville), predatory elites siphon off, through non-transparent fiscal systems, revenue that could ease poverty. Worse, some violently predatory governments so scare their citizens that they would rather avoid any dealings with the state, says the study.

In one of the most interesting chapters, the report analyses several states. Of the 32 countries identified as chronically deprived, 22 are considered fragile states, racked by conflict, war and greedy elites. A fragile state is one that does not reduce risk to its citizens through providing law and order, services and infrastructure.

“Shoring up fragile states should be as important to donors as tackling climate change”, Shepherd said at the launch of the report.

In mineral-rich but ‘poor-unfriendly’ states, donors should support advocacy efforts to empower citizens and provide technical assistance for social protection, mainly on health and education, nudging such states to become institutions that interact meaningfully with poor people.

In resource-poor countries with ‘poor-friendly’ governments, donors should step up budget support, reduce aid volatility, and shoulder much of the cost of providing basic services and social protection.

This, until economic growth raises the revenue base. Eventually, functional states should set up effective systems of public finances. People who should pay taxes will do so, instead of evading them, and the poor will benefit.

Economic growth eases poverty, but a rising tide does not lift all boats, warns the report. Growth alone does not automatically benefit the chronically poor. Living in remote areas, suffering from food shortages and poor health, exploited in work, not fully participant in social and economic life, they are locked out of the national growth process.

The much vaunted tool, the Poverty Reduction Strategies, have failed, says the report. Perceived as donor-owned products, they neglect the chronically poor, lack serious analysis of poverty, and ignore issues of justice, discrimination, gender empowerment, and migration. They remain, says the report, a missed opportunity to build a fairer social compact.

Two trends stand out: the dramatic reduction in the numbers of the poor in China, and that in Latin America and the Caribbean poverty is becoming urban rather than rural. In other parts of the developing world, 70 percent of the poor are rural but, given the world’s rapid urbanization, a shift towards urban chronic poverty can be predicted.

This demands bold policies towards migration and urban planning. Instead of seeing migrants as a problem, as policy-makers and urban residents tend to, they should be assisted in gaining a share of urban benefits, productivity and growth. In remote areas, establishing urban growth poles can boost local economies.

At the root of poverty lies powerlessness. The chronically poor have limited citizenship and little or no voice in the capitals. Society is mostly indifferent to them. But social movements - from cooperatives to ethnic minorities, from the landless rural to urban squatters - can influence the public policies needed to eliminate the chronic poverty traps.

“The chronically poor in developing countries do not need to wait forever,” Shepherd told IPS.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Human Rights in the Age of Counter-Terrorism

by Shiraz Deen

UNITED NATIONS - Member states of the U.N. have frequently disregarded international human rights laws and principles in the name of counter-terrorism, an expert panel here found.

The panel entitled “Fortress or Sand-Castle? Human Rights in the Age of Counter-Terrorism“, was the seventh instalment of the New Human Rights Dialogue Series, a 12 part monthly series in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ‘read today very much like a catalogue of abuses, and quite often abuses carried out in the name of something called counter-terrorism,’ said Craig Mokhiber, of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, who moderated the panel.

Some areas of concern with regards to counter-terrorism stressed by the panellists are the expansion of police powers, use of secret courts and evidence, use of preventative detention, and the application of the death penalty for non-lethal crimes.

‘Counter-terrorism laws passed worldwide have represented a broad expansion of government power to investigate detain, prosecute, and imprison individuals with minimal judicial oversight, public transparency, and due process,’ said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counter-terrorism programme director at Human Rights Watch.

These laws restrict the rights of terrorists, political dissidents, social activists, and common criminals, according to Mariner.

The legislation is partly the result of the lack of an international definition for terrorism, without which countries are allowed to create their own broad definitions of what constitutes a terrorist organisation or act. Human rights violations resulting from laws based on these broad definitions are exacerbated by international pressure from the Security Council for member states to show that they are combating terrorism domestically.

The U.S. among other nations has attempted to justify the derogation of certain international human rights laws by claiming that the ‘war on terror’ is a new kind of armed conflict that lies outside of international human rights law and warrants the creation of a new structure of humanitarian law.

Margaret Satterthwaite, co-director of the international human rights clinic at the centre of human rights and global justice at New York University School of Law, noted that, ‘this argument has been rejected by a number of key high courts of various member states of the U.N. and even if one were to accept such an argument, one would still be under the rule of international humanitarian principles of customary international law when forging those new rules.’

The panellists explained that the Security Council has been slow to incorporate human rights into its global counter-terrorism strategy.

Joanna Weschler, director of research of the Security Council Report — a non-profit organisation affiliated with Columbia University — described the Council’s progress on integrating human rights into the counter-terrorism strategy as a, ‘process of slow and partial overcoming of a very deep reluctance.’

Weschler recalled that, ‘Council members were initially quite adamant that the Council would not make safeguarding human rights part of its anti-terror agenda and I remember very vividly in that period when a P5 ambassador said to me, ‘Joanna don’t expect to see the two words human and rights together in any council documents on terrorism any time soon’, and I must say they kept their word for a while.’

Weschler referenced Security Council resolution 1390, which expanded the Council’s sanctions on Afghanistan to be applicable worldwide. One result of this resolution was the creation of a list of individuals and entities that could be subjected to asset freezes, travel bans, and other sanctions — but there were no clear rules governing how parties were placed or removed from the list, and once listed, parties could not find out the reason for their listing or challenge it. Numerous cases of mistaken identity, post-mortem listing of individuals, and other human rights violations stemmed from the creation of the list, Weschler said.

The original sanctions were imposed on the Taliban in part because of their violation of human rights and were supported by human rights groups because they targeted governing bodies as opposed to citizens. To date the Security Council members have raised strong opposition to the creation of an independent review panel for the list.

Although there are many areas in which human rights continue to be neglected, the Security Council and other U.N. bodies have recently begun to take significant steps towards integrating human rights into counter-terrorist activities. The 2006 U.N. Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy lists human rights as one of its 4 pillars and states that, ‘the promotion and protection of human rights for all and the rule of law is essential to all components of the Strategy, recognising that effective counter-terrorism measures and the protection of human rights are not conflicting goals, but complementary and mutually reinforcing.’

The final document of the International Process on Global Counter-Terrorism Cooperation has recently been released and lists numerous recommendations for the General Assembly to consider in advance of the first formal review of the of the U.N. Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy in September. Among the recommendations the document lists are numerous enhancements of U.N. efforts to promote human rights within the context of counter-terrorism including further inclusion of human rights experts within the counter- terrorist bodies of the U.N. and greater support for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Emi MacLean of the Centre for Constitutional Rights concluded, ‘There seem to be varying options as we move forward. We could see international rights and humanitarian obligations as inapplicable to the current paradigm and forcing a paradigm shift… or we can reaffirm that [human rights] laws continue to have resonance and import and indeed continue to carry obligations even, or perhaps, especially within this context when we are tempted to derogate from them.’

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Mixed Feelings Over WTO Failure in Geneva

by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

NEW DELHI - The collapse of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations at Geneva has left Indian analysts with mixed feelings. One view is that no deal is better than a bad one. The other is that because the alternative for developing countries is far worse, India should have been more flexible.

The United States blamed India and China for being ‘overly protective’ in opening their doors to a wide range of imports — from food products to chemicals and automobiles. Many countries from the developing world, on the other hand, argued that farm subsidies in the U.S. and Europe were squeezing their own farmers out of the market, thereby reducing local food production and leaving their countries vulnerable to sudden spikes in food prices, as happened in recent months.China’s representative at the WTO said that what the U.S. was demanding from developing countries was ‘a price as high as heaven’. India’s Commerce Minister Kamal Nath stated that the U.S. wanted to enhance the commercial interests of its large agri-business corporations whereas developing countries like India wanted to ensure that the ‘livelihood of its farmers’ are protected.

Nath told journalists in New Delhi on Thursday: “The U.S. created the deadlock on an issue which was not trade but related to livelihood of farmers. I can negotiate commerce but I cannot negotiate livelihood security”. India, the minister said ‘’is ready to be at the table without compromising on issues which concern poor farmers not only of India, but 100 other developing countries”.

The breaking point in the Geneva talks came on the exact modalities of devising the Special Safeguards Mechanism in the Agreement on Agriculture that allows a country to temporarily increase customs tariffs in response to a surge in import volumes or a sharp decline in prices. India and China wanted a 10 percent surge to be a cut-off point whereas the U.S. wanted the proportion to be 40 per cent.

This position of the Indian government has been supported by business associations. “It is disheartening to know that the talks collapsed over the issue of a reasonable trigger point needed to safeguard the livelihood concerns of millions of subsistence farmers in developing countries…Even the 10 percent import surge proposal from India (and other countries) was very liberal,” said R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director, Tata Sons Ltd. (one of India’s big business groups) in a statement issued in his capacity as head of a committee on trade agreements of the Confederation of Indian Industry.

The WTO — with 153 countries as its members — is meant to facilitate rules-based international trade that is fair and with grievance redressal mechanisms. In the Doha Round, the concerns of the poor countries were sought to be addressed through ‘special and differential treatment’ when it came to reduction of import tariffs.

It was also stated at that there would be ‘less than full reciprocity’ between developed and developing countries when it came to cuts in import tariffs. In other words, rich countries were supposed to reduce duties relatively more than poor nations. None of this has happened and appears unlikely to take place in the near future.

That the U.S. ended up blaming India and China for the collapse of the talks — ironically described in official documents as the Doha ‘Development’ Agenda — that had started in Qatar’s capital in November 2001, merely reflected the planet’s changing economic equations.

What was more significant was the fact that affluent nations could not ‘buy up’ a few developing countries with special sops as had been done many times during past rounds of negotiations. It has been nearly seven years since the Doha Round of talks has been going on. Two earlier rounds of trade negotiations, the Tokyo Round and the Uruguay Round, had lasted six years and more than seven years respectively. The difference this time is that the developing world has remained united.

Developing countries — from better-off ‘emerging’ economies like China and India to the ‘small and vulnerable’ nations of sub-Saharan Africa — have stuck together through thick and thin and refused to yield ground to the powerful nations of North America and Europe, and Japan.

Special deals with individual countries were sought to be struck. They did not materialise. Sweeteners were held out. They were refused. The U.S. and Europe offered to consider more temporary work visas for skilled professionals that India has been demanding for a while. Four West African nations (Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso and Chad) had mobilised themselves to press for a cut in American government subsidies to its cotton farmers.

There was a glimmer of hope on Jul. 22 when WTO Director General Pascal Lamy (whose current mandate expires at the end of August) suggested that there was forward movement in the talks among trade ministers of 30 different countries and that the U.S. and Europe would pare farm subsidies while developing countries would reduce import tariffs. By Tuesday evening, after nine days of intense negotiations, it was clear that the talks would fail.

When the U.S. said it would reduce the ceiling of its official annual aid to agriculture to nearly 15 million dollars, a member of the delegation from Brazil sarcastically remarked ‘nice try’ and added that what the U.S. government would be doling out to its farmers was ‘still too high’.

The U.S. is the only country in the world where a higher proportion of its population is behind bars (three percent) than the percentage of people who farm (two per cent). It cannot be denied that at least half of the population of the world outside theU.S. directly depends on agriculture for their livelihood. Three-fourths of the world’s poor survive on farming and 95 percent of the world’s small and marginal farmers live in developing countries. By seeking to subsidise a small section of less than six million Americans, the U.S. has pitted their interests against those of nearly 90 per cent of world’s population.

“I am happy that developing countries could not be divided or pushed around but I am not that happy that the talks failed,” says Biswajit Dhar, head of the Centre for WTO Studies at New Delhi’s prestigious Indian Institute of Foreign Trade.

In an exclusive interview to IPS, he added that the collapse of the Geneva negotiations meant that multilateralism in world trade was under severe attack. “In the WTO, each one of the 153 member countries has a vote that does not depend on the size of the country or the volume of its international trade. This ensures that the writ of the large and the powerful does not prevail and is, hence, good for small, developing countries.”

Since the end of the Uruguay Round of talks, at least 80 bilateral free trade agreements have been signed and the WTO estimates that this number could hit 400. At the same time, the expansion of world that had been earlier predicted has not materialized. Between 2001 and 2006, world trade expanded from 7.6 trillion dollars to 13.6 trillion dollars. In 2001, the World Bank had claimed that the successful conclusion of the Doha Round would ensure additional trade of 850 billion dollars per year but it has since slashed this figure to only 50 billion.

Dhar argues that the economically well-off nations do not want a level-playing field nor do they want substantive reform in international trading systems despite public professions to the contrary. However, other analysts argue that the position adopted by ‘strong developing countries’ like China, India and Brazil on reduction of farm subsidies in the West will not benefit food-importing developing countries.

“As food prices go up further in the U.S. and in Europe, many poor countries — including quite a few in Africa — that are dependent on food imports, would get hurt very badly leading to more poverty, social tension and political turmoil,” says T.K. Bhaumik, chairman, economic affairs committee of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India.

Speaking exclusively to IPS, he asked rhetorically: “Why have representatives of only 30 countries been mainly involved in the Geneva talks? What about the interests of the remaining 123 countries? The WTO negotiations have become a joke.”

Bhaumik was of the view that trade negotiations are “like a game among unequal participants”. He said: “Whereas the rich act as bullies, the emerging developing countries are not exactly holy cows who are doing a lot to improve livelihood conditions for their subsistence farmers. I believe we should not be shedding crocodile tears and should not have too ambitious a target for reduction of farm subsidies in the West.

India’s ‘Mint’ newspaper editorialised on Friday that the “patchwork nature” of bilateral deals “when coupled with a tide of protectionism” would erode the authority of the WTO and its ability to settle trade disputes. Further, “the ability of trade to dampen country-specific macroeconomic problems, for example, due to high food prices, will be greatly reduced”.

Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service

Arabs Despair of US Even More

by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani

CAIRO - For decades, the U.S. has jealously guarded its role of sole arbiter of the Arab-Israeli dispute. In light of recent shows of support for Israel by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, however, many Arabs fear that Zionist influence on the U.S. body politic — across the political spectrum — has made the notion of ‘U.S. even-handedness’ a contradiction in terms.

“When it comes to the Middle East conflict, the Arabs no longer see any difference between Republicans and Democrats,” Ahmed Thabet, political science professor at Cairo University told IPS. “Both parties vie with one another in expressing total support for Israel.”

In a speech before Israeli parliament in May, U.S. President George W. Bush went further than any of his predecessors in voicing praise for the self-proclaimed Jewish state. Referring to Israelis as a “chosen people”, Bush pledged Washington’s unwavering support against Israel’s traditional nemeses, including Iran and resistance parties Hamas and Hezbollah.

In statements heavy on “Judeo-Christian” religious references, Bush went on to describe Washington’s alliance with Israel as “unbreakable”.

Similar sentiments have been echoed by Bush’s would be Republican successor, Senator John McCain, who has also pledged “eternal” U.S. support for Israel.

“Israel and the U.S. must always stand together,” McCain declared before the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in early June. “We are the most natural of allies. And, like Israel itself, that alliance is for ever.”

Calling Israel “an inspiration to free nations everywhere,” McCain barely addressed longstanding Palestinian aspirations for statehood. Like Bush, he denounced regional actors opposed to Israel’s occupation of Arab land, referring to Hamas as “the terrorist-led group in charge of Gaza.”

Neither Bush nor McCain so much as mention — let alone criticise — Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinian populations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This treatment includes frequent military assaults often targeting civilians, the use of ‘targeted assassinations’, the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip (which has brought that territory to the brink of starvation), continued construction of Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and the forced removal of non-Jewish, Arab inhabitants from the city of Jerusalem.

Arab analysts, meanwhile, express little surprise at such blatant pro-Israel bias, coming as it does from a political party thoroughly influenced by the so-called “neo-conservative” movement, of which Israeli ascendancy is a central tenet.

More disturbing to Arab critics of U.S. policy is the fact that Democratic presidential contenders have shown just as much zeal for Israeli supremacy as their Republican rivals.

In his own speech to AIPAC in early June, Obama stressed the need for a “more nuanced” approach to U.S. Middle East peacemaking. He stunned many, however, when he went on to state that Jerusalem would “remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”

Although Israel has occupied East Jerusalem since 1967, its claim to the city has never been recognised by the international community. Officially, the status of Jerusalem — which Palestinians also want as capital of their future state — is supposed to be determined in long-awaited “final status” negotiations.

Obama again disappointed Arabs by reiterating his overt support for Israel during a two-day visit to the Hebrew nation last week.

“I’m here…to reaffirm the special relationship between Israel and the U.S. and my abiding commitment to Israel’s security,” Obama told Israeli President Shimon Peres Jul. 23. Later, he told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of his “unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.”

Obama went on to repeat his earlier statement that Jerusalem “will be” the capital of Israel, although he added that the issue should ultimately be decided in negotiations. He also backed Israel’s refusal to negotiate with Hamas, which has governed the Gaza Strip for more than one year after winning legislative elections in early 2006.

While in Jerusalem, Obama visited the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, where he laid a commemorative wreath. He also visited the southern Israeli town Sderot, the occasional target of short-range rockets from the Gaza Strip, where he reaffirmed his support for Israel’s right to defend itself “against those who threaten its people.”

By contrast, Obama spent less than one hour in discussions with Palestinian Authority (PA) officials — PA President Mahmoud Abbas and PM Salam Fayyad — in the West Bank. Not surprisingly, he did not meet with any Hamas representatives.

Obama’s blatant obeisance to Israel, despite an electoral campaign promising voters “change we can believe in,” has led many Arabs to despair of the notion of unbiased arbitration by Washington — under the leadership of either candidate.

“Obama paid his respects to dozens of Israeli victims in Sderot while neglecting to mention the thousands of recent Palestinian victims of Israeli violence,” said Thabet. “How can anyone expect him to be even-handed on the issue when he becomes president?”

According to Abdel-Halim Kandil, political analyst and editor-in-chief of independent weekly Sout al-Umma, neo-conservative ideology “is not exclusive to the Republicans, but permeates both political parties” in the U.S.

“When it comes to Israel, there’s virtually no difference in Republican and Democratic party policies,” Kandil told IPS. “The Democratic administration of (former U.S. president Bill) Clinton, for example, consisted of even more Jewish Zionists — including the defence secretary (William Cohen), the secretary of state (Madeleine Albright) and the national security advisor (Samuel Berger) — than the current Republican Bush administration.

“These people occupy most of the top political and military positions throughout the American political system,” added Kandil. “Anyone who thinks Washington can serve as a fair mediator in the Israel-Palestine conflict — under Republicans or Democrats — is delusional.”

Kandil said the chief neo-conservative objectives are “securing Israel’s presence in the Middle East, the return of the Jews to Israel, and the eventual construction of the Jewish temple on the site where the al-Aqsa mosque now stands.”

According to Thabet, the neo-conservatives in Washington have exploited U.S. military might to neutralise regional opposition — mainly of the Islamic variety — to Israel.

“They have used U.S. military force to spread their version of ‘democracy’, which excludes all forms of political Islam — be it Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hamas in Palestine or the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,” said Thabet.

Some local observers suggest that the neo-conservatives in the current Bush administration, many of whom hold dual U.S.-Israel citizenship, are more beholden to Israel than to the U.S.

“These people have a greater attachment to Israel and world Zionism than they do to the U.S.,” Magdi Hussein, secretary-general of Egypt’s Labour Party, frozen by the government since 2000, told IPS. “But they have tried hard to convince the American public that U.S. and Israeli interests are one and the same.”

Arab analysts further note that the neo-conservative influence extends beyond the U.S. political system and into western ‘mainstream’ media.

“The Zionist lobby can make or break any would-be presidential candidate,” said Hussein. “This isn’t due to its large voting numbers, but to its enormous influence on the media — both in the U.S. and in Western Europe.”

According to Thabet, the “Zionist influence” on the U.S. media has grown dramatically since the early 1980s. “Since then, neo-conservative elements have bought up many important American media institutions, including major news outlets,” he said.

“This, along with the establishment of numerous ‘research centres’ and ‘think-tanks’, has been their primary means of promoting the neo-conservative agenda in the U.S.,” Thabet added.

Kandil says most Arab governments — in contrast to the people they represent — are in any case not particularly interested in even-handed U.S. arbitration of the conflict.

“The Arab regimes don’t look to Washington as a fair mediator — they look to Washington to keep them in power, despite their lack of legitimacy and popularity,” said Kandil. “The Israel-Palestine dispute can only reach a just resolution when the Arabs choose leaders able and willing to carry out the popular will.”

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Bush, US Military Pressure Iraqis on Withdrawal

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Instead of moving toward accommodating the demand of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal, the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military leadership are continuing to pressure their erstwhile client regime to bow to the U.S. demand for a long-term military presence in the country.

The emergence of this defiant U.S. posture toward the Iraqi withdrawal demand underlines just how important long-term access to military bases in Iraq has become to the U.S. military and national security bureaucracy in general.

From the beginning, the Bush administration’s response to the al-Maliki withdrawal demand has been to treat it as a mere aspiration that the United States need not accept.

The counter-message that has been conveyed to Iraq from a multiplicity of U.S. sources, including former CENTCOM commander William Fallon, is that the security objectives of Iraq must include continued dependence on U.S. troops for an indefinite period. The larger, implicit message, however, is that the United States is still in control, and that it — not the Iraqi government — will make the final decision.

That point was made initially by State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos, who stated flatly on Jul. 9 that any U.S. decision on withdrawal ‘will be conditions-based’.

In a sign that the U.S. military is also mounting pressure on the Iraqi government to abandon its withdrawal demand, Fallon wrote an op-ed piece published in the New York Times Jul. 20 that called on Iraqi leaders to accept the U.S. demand for long-term access to military bases.

Fallon, who became something of a folk hero among foes of the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East for having been forced out of his CENTCOM position for his anti-aggression stance, takes an extremely aggressive line against the Iraqi withdrawal demand in the op-ed. In fact the piece is remarkable not only for its condescending attitude toward the Iraqi government, but for its peremptory tone toward it.

Fallon is dismissive of the idea that Iraq can take care of itself without U.S. troops to maintain ultimate control. ‘The government of Iraq is eager to exert its sovereignty,’ Fallon writes, ‘but its leaders also recognise that it will be some time before Iraq can take full control of security.’

Fallon goes on to insist that ‘the government of Iraq must recognise its continued, if diminishing reliance on the American military’. And in the penultimate paragraph, he demands ‘political posturing in pursuit of short-term gains must cease’.

Fallon, now retired from the military, is obviously serving as a stand-in for U.S. military chiefs for whom the public expression of such a hard-line stance against the Iraqi withdrawal demand would have been considered inappropriate.

But the former U.S. military proconsul in the Middle East, like his active-duty colleagues, appears to actually believe that the United States can intimidate the al-Maliki regime. The assumption implicit in his op-ed is that the United States has both the right and power to preempt Iraq’s national interests in order to continue to build its military empire in the Middle East.

As CENTCOM chief, Fallon had been planning on the assumption that the U.S. military would continue to have access to military bases in both Iraq and Afghanistan for many years to come. A Jul. 14 story by Washington Post national security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus said that the Army had requested 184 million dollars to build power plants at its five main bases in Iraq.

The five bases, Pincus reported, are among the ‘final bases and support locations where troops, aircraft and equipment will be consolidated as the U.S. military presence is reduced’.

Funding for the power plants, which would be necessary to support a large U.S. force in Iraq within the five remaining bases, for a longer-term stay, was eliminated from the military construction bill for fiscal year 2008. Pincus quoted a Congressional source as noting that the power plants would have taken up to two years to complete.

The plan to keep several major bases in Iraq is just part of a larger plan, on which Fallon himself was working, for permanent U.S. land bases in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Fallon revealed in Congressional testimony last year that Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan is regarded as ‘the centrepiece for the CENTCOM Master Plan for future access to and operations in Central Asia’.

As Fallon was writing his op-ed, the Bush administration was planning for a videoconference between Bush and al-Maliki Jul. 17, evidently hoping to move the obstreperous al-Maliki away from his position on withdrawal.

Afterward, however, the White House found it necessary to cover up the fact that al-Maliki had refused to back down in the face of Bush’s pressure.

It issued a statement claiming that the two leaders had agreed to ‘a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals’ but that the goals would include turning over more control to Iraqi security forces and the ‘further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq’ — but not a complete withdrawal.

But that was quickly revealed to be a blatant misrepresentation of al-Maliki’s position. As al-Maliki’s spokesman Ali Dabbagh confirmed, the ‘time horizon’ on which Bush and al-Maliki had agreed not only covered the ‘full handover of security responsibility to the Iraqi forces in order to decrease American forces’ but was to ‘allow for its [sic] withdrawal from Iraq.’

An adviser to al-Maliki, Sadiq Rikabi, also told the Washington Post that al-Maliki was insisting on specific timelines for each stage of the U.S. withdrawal, including the complete withdrawal of troops.

The Iraqi prime minister’s Jul. 19 interview with the German magazine Der Speigel, in which he said that Barack Obama’s 16-month timetable ‘would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes’, was the Iraqi government’s bombshell in response to the Bush administration’s efforts to pressure it on the bases issue.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack emphasised at his briefing Tuesday that the issue would be determined by ‘a conclusion that’s mutually acceptable to sovereign nations’.

That strongly implied that the Bush administration regards itself as having a veto power over any demand for withdrawal and signals an intention to try to intimidate al-Maliki.

Both the Bush administration and the U.S. military appear to harbour the illusion that the U.S. troop presence in Iraq still confers effective political control over its clients in Baghdad.

However, the change in the al-Maliki regime’s behaviour over the past six months, starting with the prime minister’s abrupt refusal to go along with Gen. David Petraeus’s plan for a joint operation in Basra in mid-March, strongly suggests that the era of Iraqi dependence on the United States has ended.

Given the strong consensus on the issue among Shiite political forces of all stripes as well as Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite spiritual leader, the al-Maliki regime could not back down to U.S. pressure without igniting a political crisis.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in June 2005.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

New Spying Law Quickly Challenged

by William Fisher

NEW YORK - Civil liberties advocates have lost no time in asking a federal court to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the new wiretapping law passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush last week.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a coalition of other groups declared that the new law ‘gives the Bush administration virtually unchecked power to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls.’

The ACLU coalition’s legal challenge, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks a court order declaring that the new law is unconstitutional and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero charged that the new law ‘not only legalises the secret warrantless surveillance programme the president approved in late 2001, it gives the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications.’

He added, ‘Spying on Americans without warrants or judicial approval is an abuse of government power — and that’s exactly what this law allows. The ACLU will not sit by and let this evisceration of the Fourth Amendment go unchallenged.’

The wiretapping issue became the centre of a storm of criticism after the New York Times revealed that, following the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush had secretly authorised the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and others inside the country to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the U.S. without warrants in an effort to track possible ‘dirty numbers’ linked to al Qaeda, the officials said.

Criticism at the time came from a wide variety of civil libertarians, including Bob Barr, a former conservative Republican congressman from Georgia and currently the Libertarian Party candidate for president. He told IPS that in 2000, Gen. Michael Hayden, then head of the NSA and currently director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a congressional hearing on wiretap targets, ‘If that American person is in the United States of America, I must have a court order before I initiate any collection against him or her.’

Barr’s advice was, ‘If the president doesn’t like the law, the solution should be to amend, not violate it.’

The Bush administration then called on Congress to pass amendments to the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted in 1978. The 2008 version emerged as the result of a ‘compromise’ between Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate. Among its other provisions, the new law granted retroactive immunity to the telephone companies that had assisted the government in the warrantless wiretaps.

The surveillance legal challenge was filed on behalf of a coalition of attorneys and human rights, labour, legal and media organisations whose ability to perform their work — which relies on confidential communications — will be greatly compromised by the new law, the ACLU said.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 declares that ‘Electronic surveillance must be conducted in a constitutional manner that affords the greatest possible protection for individual privacy and free speech rights.’ But the ACLU and its coalition claims the new wiretapping law ‘fails to provide fundamental safeguards that the Constitution unambiguously requires.’

Plaintiffs in the suit include The Nation magazine and two of its contributing journalists, Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges; Amnesty International USA; Global Rights; Global Fund for Women; Human Rights Watch; PEN American Centre; Service Employees International Union; the Washington Office on Latin America; the International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association; and several individual defence attorneys and journalists.

In its legal challenge, the coalition argues that ‘The new spying law violates Americans’ rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. The new law permits the government to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.’

Nation magazine writer Naomi Klein said that ‘As a journalist, my job requires communication with people in all parts of the world — from Iraq to Argentina. If the U.S. government is given unchecked surveillance power to monitor reporters’ confidential sources, my ability to do this work will be seriously compromised.’

She added, ‘I cannot in good conscience accept that my conversations with people who live outside the U.S. will put them in harm’s way as a result of overzealous government spying. Privacy in my communications is not simply an expectation, it’s a right.’ Human Rights Watch programme director Iain Levine said the new legislation ‘will allow mass government interception of electronic communications, so long as the target is overseas, without meaningful judicial oversight or warrant identifying who or what is to be subject to surveillance.’

‘In the course of our work reporting on and defending human rights, we regularly need to be in contact with activists and human rights victims all over the world,’ he said. ‘Knowing that the U.S. government could be monitoring our calls and emails often inhibits our efforts, and causes us to take expensive and delaying measures to keep our communications secure.’

Internet privacy under the new law continues to be a concern to civil libertarians. For example, the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a number of Freedom of Information Act requests with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other U.S. Justice Department offices, seeking the release of documents it says will reveal whether the government has been using the USA Patriot Act to spy on Internet users to collect secret information about their Internet habits without a search warrant.

Kevin Bankston, an EFF attorney, told IPS, ‘Although Internet users reasonably expect that their online reading habits are private, the department of Justice will not confirm whether it collects or believes itself authorised to collect URLs using pen-trap devices.’

Pen-traps collect information about the numbers dialed on a telephone but do not record the actual content of phone conversations. Because of this limitation, court orders authorising pen-trap surveillance are easy to get; instead of having to show probable cause, the government need only certify relevance to its investigation. The government is not required to inform people that they are or were the subjects of pen-trap surveillance.

Copyright © 2008 IPS North America.

South African Small Farmers Pushed to Plant GM Seed

by Kristin Palitza

DURBAN, South Africa - Baphethile Mntambo has been farming organically for the past five years because she knows that avoiding chemicals will in the long-term benefit her yield. She decided not to plant genetically modified seeds because she has heard that they cannot be saved for the next season and will eventually deplete her soil. But she is not entirely sure how and why.

“I have heard about GMO, but I don’t understand what it is exactly,” she says. “The only thing I know is that it will cost a lot of money to buy the seeds, the fertiliser and the pesticides.”

Mntambo is one of 50 small-scale farmers in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province who have been taught how to farm organically by non-governmental organisation Valley Trust. The farmers learn to plant seasonal crops that will provide their families both with food security and an opportunity to generate income by selling their produce at local markets.

“We decided to promote organic farming to create sustainability for small-scale farmers. We believe it is the only way to give them food sovereignty and stability,” explains Valley Trust food security facilitator Nhlanhla Vezi.

The Valley Trust used to cooperate with the Department of Agriculture, according to Vezi, but the collaboration ceased when the department started to put pressure on small-scale farmers to form cooperatives if they wanted its support. “The Department makes very attractive offers to provide farming equipment, water piping and seeds, but then uses this as a strategy to push GMO because of agreements they have signed with multinational GM seed patent holders,” says Vezi.

Rural farmers are often lured into planting GM seeds by the Department of Agriculture by promises of substantial bank loans and the prospect of huge earnings, agrees Lesley Liddell, director of Biowatch, an NGO promoting alternatives to GMO farming by encouraging farmers to inter-crop, use natural fertilisers and non-chemical crops. “But in the end, most farmers end up in huge debt, because they can’t save seeds and are obliged to buy the matching GM fertilisers and pesticides.”

Yet, small-scale farmers are often so desperate for financial support that they consider planting GMO crops against better knowledge if they are offered the seeds for free. “I know that GMO is not good in the long run, but if someone gave me these seeds I would still plant them,” says Tholani Bhengu, another small-scale farmer who works with the Valley Trust. “For me, the most important thing is to bring food on the table every week. I can’t afford to think now about what will happen next year.”

Because small-scale farmers in rural Africa often have little or no formal education, they are generally unable to make informed choices around GMO farming. “We encourage them to attend portfolio committees that discuss GMO regulations, but the farmers’ knowledge is very limited, so it’s difficult for them to contribute. They understand the issues but not the legislation,” says Liddell.

South Africa is the only country within the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to grow GM crops — maize, cotton and soya — commercially. Since 1997, GMO farming is regulated by the Genetically Modified Organisms Act.

“The adoption of GM crops in SA has increased over the last ten years and this has also filtered down to small-scale farmers,” confirms Priscilla Sehoole, chief communications officer of the national Department of Agriculture.

“As with any other technology, there are potential risks associated with GMO technology and these include those related to human and animal health and also the environment,” she admits. “Therefore, the regulation of all activities involving GMOs is subjected to a scientific safety assessment process that evaluates the potential risks.”

Seehole says the South African Department of Agriculture would like to harmonise GMO policies across SADC to “eliminate some of the technical barriers that (currently) hinder trade in the region.”

But anti-GMO activists, such as the African Centre for Biosafety, are opposed to this approach. “The GM industry is pushing for harmonised legislation because it will make it easier to commercialise varieties of GM crops across countries. But those concerned with biosafety very much doubt if regional harmonisation (of biosafety legislation) would be of advantage,” says African Centre of Biosafety director Mariam Mayet.

“At the moment, each SADC country has its own policies and all these laws are very different from each other. This means that each GMO application has to go through the approval system and public consultation of each country, which is good for transparency and accountability ” she explains.

“When South Africa passed GMO legislation in 1997, most people weren’t aware of how highly contentious the technology would become. But now there is no way back. Once you’re in it, you’re in it,” says Mayet.

South Africa’s food industry is already saturated with GM, she says: “Everything is contaminated, and to make matters worse, labelling of GM content is not mandatory. We need serious policy reform and to implement a testing system that traces which foods contain GMO and which do not.”

Over the past decade, South Africa has entered trade agreements with large, multi-national agricultural biotechnology corporations, such as Monsanto, which — in an attempt to control the world’s agricultural production — promote the subsidisation of patented GM seeds. Through an incentive system supporting monocultures, small-scale farmers are systematically integrated into commercial agriculture, mainly for export, and encouraged to put together their land.

“It all looks very nice on paper, but it is actually a clever ploy to get access to people’s land. Small-scale farmers who sign up for GM deals quickly lose control over seed management, production and eventually their land. This means they lose their food sovereignty,” says Mayet. “GMO marginalises poor, small-scale farmers. We are in for hard times and need to fight for people’s right to land and resources. But we won’t give up.”

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Israeli Claims over Journalist Challenged

by Sanjay Suri / Mel Frykberg

LONDON - Medical reports seen by IPS appear to confirm the testimony of IPS Gaza correspondent Mohammed Omer of physical abuse at the hands of Israelis last month.

Omer said he was physically and mentally abused at the Allenby crossing into Gaza while on his way back from a European tour. In London, he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn prize for investigative reporting.Omer left for Europe through an agreement secured by Dutch diplomats to escort him in and out of Gaza. The abuse was reported Jun. 26 as Omer was searched at the crossing in Israeli custody while a Dutch diplomat waited outside.

According to Omer’s testimony, he was forced to strip by an Israeli officer wearing a police uniform. He was pinned down on the floor with a boot on the neck. He says he collapsed during interrogation, and when he came round his eyelids were being forcibly opened. He was then dragged along the floor by his feet by officials of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet.

Omer was taken by ambulance from the Allenby crossing to the Jericho hospital in Palestinian territory in the West Bank. From there he was transferred to Gaza after a few hours.

A note from the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) denies Omer’s account of physical abuse in Israeli custody. “In contradiction to his claims, at no time was the complainant subjected to either physical or mental violence.”

But an ambulance report of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society says: “We note finger signs on the neck and chest.” A report from the European Gaza Hospital of the Palestinian National Authority’s Ministry of Health includes the following notation after examination of Omer: “Ecchymosis (discolouration caused by bleeding underneath, typically caused by bruising) at upper part of chest wall was found.”

The report makes these further observations: “Tenderness on the anterior part of the neck and upper back mainly along the right ribs moderate to severe pain,” and “by examination the scrotum due to pain varicocele (varicose veins in the spermatic cord) at left side detected and surgery was decided later.”

The Israeli GPO note acknowledges that Omer and his baggage were searched “due to suspicion that he had been in contact with hostile elements and had been asked by them to deliver items to Judea and Samaria (towns in the Palestinian West Bank).”

Omer denies he was in touch with “hostile elements” during his lecture tour of Europe. “And there was no question of going to the West Bank,” he says. “I only had permission to leave and enter Gaza with Dutch diplomatic escorts, in a closed diplomatic car. I don’t deliver items, and in any case I was never headed to the West Bank.” Also, the GPO note does not specify what they were looking for.

The Israeli GPO note says further: “Regarding the complainant’s collapse, as it were, it should be noted that the paramedic who attended to him found no evidence of a physical cause of collapse. The complainant’s behaviour raises doubts as to the sincerity of the situation. In any event, the complainant was sent to an infirmary and an ambulance was ordered for him.”

According to an AP report, Dr. Diaa Husseini who examined Omer at the hospital in Jericho, found no signs of physical injury. The report said Dr Husseini found Omer had suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by emotional stress and was given stomach medication and released after two hours.

Dr. Husseini confirmed to IPS, by phone, that he saw no external injuries on Omer. “However, it is possible that he had further internal injuries, but I never examined him for those as he never complained about any internal pain or other injuries,” the doctor said.

Omer says Dr. Husseini only gave him intravenous support and prescribed some medicines because he was to leave Jericho within two hours. “I think what Dr. Husseini did was basically to make me stable, which his staff nurse did.”

Omer disputes other statements in the Israeli GPO note. “We should point out that there are numerous additional contradictions in the complainant’s allegations,” the GPO note says. “For example, in the media he reported that he was humiliated, stripped, and that a gun was held to his head. And yet, in his complaint filed with the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) spokesperson, the complainant complained that two uniformed personnel sprayed his face.”

Omer insists: “I was forced at gunpoint to take off my clothes.” He had also said to the IDF that “I felt someone putting liquid in my nose and eyes, to wake me up.”

In the face of allegations and denials by the Israeli GPO, the focus now shifts to the medical records, which seem to indicate use of force, as Omer had earlier testified.

International press freedom groups have called for an immediate and public investigation of Omer’s treatment.

Ahmed Dadou, spokesman from the Dutch Foreign Ministry at The Hague, told IPS shortly after the events, “We are taking this whole incident very seriously as we don’t believe the behaviour of the Israeli officials is in accordance with a modern democracy.”

Copyright © 2008 IPS-Inter Press Service.

Corals Collapsing in More Acid Oceans

by Stephen Leahy

FORT LAUDERDALE - Coral reefs need to be put on “life support” if they are to survive climate change, but their ultimate survival is dependant on major reductions in fossil fuel emissions, say experts.

“We’re going to hear lots of bad news about corals in the next few decades,” Rich Aronson, president of the International Society for Reef Studies, told 3,000 scientists, conservationists and policy makers at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida Monday.

Climate change is making the ocean too warm and too acidic for most corals species to survive beyond the year 2050, many marine scientists now believe.

“The situation is serious to the point of desperation,” Aronson told IPS in an interview.

Past and present carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have already altered the oceans, leading to declines in corals in many areas. This trend will continue for decades even if it were possible to eliminate all emissions today, scientists say. Current emissions are running at eight to nine gigatonnes a year and rising, resulting in dramatically altered oceans where few of the current coral species will be able to survive.

“This is a pivotal moment. We must act strongly and immediately if we are to have coral reefs as we know them,” Aronson said.

The action he and others urge involves major reductions in carbon emissions, protecting reefs from overfishing, pollution and other threats and helping corals be more resilient so they can better withstand changing conditions. The latter will act as a kind of life support system until the world community manages to sharply reduce carbon emissions. That may give corals the time they need to adapt to a changed ocean. Currently the rate of change is far too rapid for species to adapt, experts here say.

Coral reefs support about 25 to 33 percent of the oceans’ living creatures. Some one billion people depend directly and indirectly on reefs for their livelihoods. Sea birds and many species of fish would affected by the loss of reefs.

Surprisingly, most scientists pegged overfishing as the biggest threat to corals just four years ago at the last International Coral Reef Symposium, Joan Kleypas of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado told the symposium. In the intervening four years, a great deal of research has been completed on the impacts of climate change on the oceans, and that has now convinced nearly all experts that it is by far the biggest threat to oceans.

Most corals begin to die when ocean temperatures increase by more than 2.0 degrees C and that is likely to happen under nearly all future carbon emission scenarios before 2100. Detailed computer models show that all corals will suffer severe bleaching in one to five years. If emissions decline rapidly in the next decade and if corals are more resilient to ocean warming, then there is hope, according to recent research.

There is some evidence that some corals can survive some warming of ocean temperatures, but there is no solution for acidification, says Klepas.

The oceans naturally absorb carbon from the atmosphere but because of human emissions they are absorbing more and more. This additional carbon has altered the oceans’ chemistry, making them 25 to 30 percent more acidic. Each day, the oceans absorb 30 million tonnes of CO2, gradually and inevitably increasing their acidity, and leaving less calcium carbonate in the water for corals and shell-form species like phytoplankton to grow or maintain their skeletons.

“Acidification affects all marine species, not just corals,” Kleypas noted. However, little research has been done to understand specifically what those effects may be.

Kleypas admits it looks impossible to save corals, but she remains hopeful. “We need to keep CO2 levels at a reasonable rate and corals may be okay,” she said.

There is enough information about how to reduce carbon emissions and even a growing realisation that such reduction may not be costly in economic terms, Aronson said. Protecting reefs from other threats like overfishing and pollution is not difficult, but will require political leadership. Saving corals needs to be an international effort spearheaded by the United Nations.

“We (scientists) have to be pragmatic and we have to be smart about politics,” Aronson said. “All of us — scientists, conservationists and the public — have to rise up and fight to protect reefs.”

© 2008 Inter Press Service

So when will they realize that the global billionaires aren't going to include them either (the millionaires and the middle class)?

Probably when they can't get any food either. Then they will have to leave their houses and fancy jobs to head wherever there might be food.

Of course, right now the middle class doesn't see it. In that way, the impoverished are advantaged, because they are already used to being pushed around and marginalized and controlled by food supplies, etc.

Just my opinion.

They just finished having a conference in Glasgow, Scottland.

They receive support from Reuters and Inter Press Service.

Their website is really impressive and has huge resources available to sparechangenews.com.

They have a published guide to setting up a Street Paper and offer advice, support, and funding solutions.

They call for a Poverty Day Campaign on October 17th

They also have a Street News Service to help publications like us share content

Check it all out at www.street-papers.org

‘Special Weapons’ Have a Fallout on Babies

by Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail

FALLUJAH - Babies born in Fallujah are showing illnesses and deformities on a scale never seen before, doctors and residents say.

The new cases, and the number of deaths among children, have risen after “special weaponry” was used in the two massive bombing campaigns in Fallujah in 2004.

After denying it at first, the Pentagon admitted in November 2005 that white phosphorous, a restricted incendiary weapon, was used a year earlier in Fallujah.

In addition, depleted uranium (DU) munitions, which contain low-level radioactive waste, were used heavily in Fallujah. The Pentagon admits to having used 1,200 tonnes of DU in Iraq thus far.

Many doctors believe DU to be the cause of a severe increase in the incidence of cancer in Iraq, as well as among U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War and through the current occupation.

“We saw all the colours of the rainbow coming out of the exploding American shells and missiles,” Ali Sarhan, a 50-year-old teacher who lived through the two U.S. sieges of 2004 told IPS. “I saw bodies that turned into bones and coal right after they were exposed to bombs that we learned later to be phosphorus.

“The most worrying is that many of our women have suffered loss of their babies, and some had babies born with deformations.”

“I had two children who had brain damage from birth,” 28-year-old Hayfa’ Shukur told IPS. “My husband has been detained by the Americans since November 2004 and so I had to take the children around by myself to hospitals and private clinics. They died. I spent all our savings and borrowed a considerable amount of money.”

Shukur said doctors told her that it was use of the restricted weapons that caused her children’s brain damage and subsequent deaths, “but none of them had the courage to give me a written report.”

“Many babies were born with major congenital malformations,” a paediatric doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “These infants include many with heart defects, cleft lip or palate, Down’s syndrome, and limb defects.”

The doctor added, “I can say all kinds of problems related to toxic pollution took place in Fallujah after the November 2004 massacre.”

Many doctors speak of similar cases and a similar pattern. The indications remain anecdotal, in the absence of either a study, or any available official records.

The Fallujah General Hospital administration was unwilling to give any statistics on deformed babies, but one doctor volunteered to speak on condition of anonymity — for fear of reprisals if seen to be critical of the administration.

“Maternal exposure to toxins and radioactive material can lead to miscarriage and frequent abortions, still birth, and congenital malformation,” the doctor told IPS. There have been many such cases, and the government “did not move to contain the damage, or present any assistance to the hospital whatsoever.

“These cases need intensive international efforts that provide the highest and most recent technologies that we will not have here in a hundred years,” he added.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expressed concern Mar. 31 about the lack of medical supplies in hospitals in Baghdad and Basra.

“Hospitals have used up stocks of vital medical items, and require further supplies to cope with the influx of wounded patients. Access to water remains a matter of concern in certain areas,” the ICRC said in a statement.

A senior Iraqi health ministry official was quoted as saying Feb. 26 that the health sector is under “great pressure”, with scores of doctors killed, an exodus of medical personnel, poor medical infrastructure, and shortage of medicines.

“We are experiencing a big shortage of everything,” said the official, “We don’t have enough specialist doctors and medicines, and most of the medical equipment is outdated.

“We used to get many spinal and head injures, but were unable to do anything as we didn’t have enough specialists and medicines,” he added. “Intravenous fluid, which is a simple thing, is not available all the time.” He said no new hospitals had been built since 1986.

Iraqi Health Minister Salih al-Hassnawi highlighted the shortage of medicines at a press conference in Arbil in the Kurdistan region in the north Feb. 22. “The Iraqi Health Ministry is suffering from an acute shortage of medicines…We have decided to import medicines immediately to meet the needs.”

He said the 2008 health budget meant that total expenditure on medicines, medical equipment and ambulances would amount to an average of 22 dollars per citizen.

But this is too late for the unknown number of babies and their families who bore the consequences of the earlier devastation. And it is too little to cover the special needs of babies who survived with deformations.

Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported extensively from Iraq and the Middle East

© 2008 Inter Press Service

As Climate Bill Dies, Greens Express Hope

by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - While Republicans succeeded Friday in effectively killing major bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Senate to cut greenhouse emissions that contribute to global warming, environmental groups expressed hope that the three days of debate on the measure have set the stage for success next year after the November elections.”

The American people are seeking a change from the kind of cynical political games we saw (the Republican leadership) play this week,” said Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, after the bill’s supporters fell 12 votes short of the 60 they needed to cut off debate and force a vote.

“While these procedural ploys may have succeeded in today’s closely divided Senate, we are confident that a larger pro-environment majority will allow us to prevail in the next Congress,” he added.

The 48 votes cast to halt debate on the Climate Security Act (CSA) marked a significant advance from the 38 votes that similar legislation gained in 2005.

In addition, six senators, including the two presumptive presidential candidates, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, who were not present to cast their votes Friday, sent letters saying they would have voted in favour of the act.

“I think people around the world are going to be greatly encouraged by the fact that 54 members of the U.S. Senate are saying they want to support a real response to global warming,” said Independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman who, along with Republican Sen. John Warner and Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, co-sponsored the CSA.

The Senate bill, if passed, would have required that total U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases be cut to 19 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and up to 71 percent by the year 2050 primarily through a “cap-and-trade” system that would give companies financial incentives to reduce their emissions. The U.S. currently account for about 25 percent of the world’s total greenhouse emissions.

The legislation also proposed the creation of a 40-year, 800-billion-dollar “tax relief fund” to encourage energy consumers to switch to cleaner technologies.

President George W. Bush, who has consistently opposed mandatory curbing or reducing of emissions, threatened to veto the measure if it was approved by Congress. The White House claimed on the eve of this week’s debate that the bill would cost the U.S. economy six trillion dollars by 2050, while some of the Senate’s fiercer foes, backed by an ad campaign sponsored by oil and coal interests and the utilities that depend on fossil fuels, argued that it would hit poor people particularly hard at a time when gasoline prices have reached unprecedented heights.

“At t a time when the economy is struggling, when the price of gas, food and power bills are skyrocketing, this giant tax would be an unbearable new burden for Americans,” argued Republican Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell.

But, instead of debating the bill’s main features on the merits, the Republican leadership relied on procedural manoeuvres, including the threat of a filibuster, to derail the proposed legislation. On Wednesday, several Republican senators demanded that the clerk of the Senate read the nearly 500-page bill in its entirety, thus holding up business for some 10 hours.

The move forced the Democratic leadership to file a motion for “cloture”, or ending debate, which requires a super-majority of 60 votes out of the 100-seat chamber. While the motion prevailed 48-36, the leadership decided it was useless to continue debate.

Still, green groups expressed satisfaction with the week’s events and their culmination, even as they called for the introduction of stronger legislation in the new Congress which many political analysts believe will likely feature as much as a 58-seat Democratic majority (compared to a mere 51-seat majority now) and as many as 25 more Democratic members in the House of Representatives.

“While this vote fell short of the 60 votes needed for the bill to proceed, it did confirm that the Senate is growing greener as the climate worsens,” said David Moulton, director of Climate Policy at the Wilderness Society, one of the country’s biggest grassroots groups.

“We can now say that we are an election away from the United States taking responsibility for its share of the global warming problem and leading the world toward a clean energy future,” he added.

“The Climate Security Act made history as the first comprehensive stand-alone global warming bill to reach the Senate floor,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC).

“Unfortunately, allies of Big Oil and Big Coal used parliamentary tricks to obstruct progress toward building the clean energy future we need to free ourselves from these special interests and avert the worst consequences of global warming. Once we have a new president who shows real leadership on global warming, defenders of the status quo will no longer be able to thwart the public’s desire for change, as they did today,” she added.

Some groups, however, stressed that the new Congress needed to go far beyond the CSA to effectively address the challenges posed by global warming, even as they deplored Republican efforts to defeat it.

“What was lost in the sideshow on Capitol Hill this week is the fact that the CSA, as written, would have been woefully insufficient to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of global warming,” said John Passacantando, the executive director of the U.S. chapter of Greenpeace.

“After seven years of inaction from the Bush White House, and little better performance by the Senate, eyes now turn to the new administration and Congress to see if they can get it right on global warming,” he said.

Friends of the Earth noted that most climate scientists have called for emission reductions of at least 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 in order to avoid potentially catastrophic impacts. Under the CSA, those reductions would amount only to 25 percent. The group, which called the bill “wholly inadequate”, also warned that the bill’s cap-and-trade scheme could prove a major boon to major corporate polluters and the nuclear power industry.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

Senate Finds Pre-War Bush Claims Exaggerated, False

by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Claims by U.S. President George W. Bush and other top administration officials before the 2003 invasion of Iraq regarding Baghdad’s ties to al Qaeda and its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes were generally not supported by the evidence that the U.S. intelligence community had at the time, according to a major new report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released Thursday.

The long-awaited report, the last in a series published over the past several years by the committee, found that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, in particular, frequently made assertions in the run-up to the war that key intelligence agencies could not substantiate or about which there was substantial disagreement within the intelligence community.

“In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent,” the Committee chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, said on releasing the 172-page report. “As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence,” he added. “But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate.”

The Committee also released a second report Thursday on a se