[Peace] News notes 2007-02-18

[C. G. Estabrook]

[These notes on the "Global War on Terror" were prepared for the weekly 
meeting of AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana. 
Much of this material was discussed on the Saturday morning radio 
program, "News from Neptune," by me and Paul Mueth, with the assistance 
of producer J. B. Nicholson-Owens and research director Eric Sizemore. 
Archived programs and citations are at <www.newsfromneptune.com>. Other 
references will be provided on request. —CGE]

	The theme of the week -- as so often in America -- is torture.

[1] THE THREAT OF PEACE. The USG needs wars and rumors of war in order 
to feed its economy and to justify its military control of ME energy 
resources, as the way to control its economic rivals in a tripolar 
world.  That's the principal reason for the fraudulent GWOT, so it's a 
great threat to ongoing US policy whenever the locals break ranks and 
make peace, as for example Saudi Arabia is trying to do by bringing the 
Palestinian factions together in a meeting in Mecca (Israel is 
desperately afraid that the major powers will cease their economic 
strangulation of Palestine); the Saudis are also working with the 
Iranians to broker peace among Lebanese factions (also to the great 
displeasure of the US and Israel).  Even the USG's most dependent 
clients aren't always following orders:
	SOS Rice this week expressed disappointment over a deal between 
Pakistan and pro-Taliban militants.  She was referring to the agreement 
Pakistan signed with tribal leaders in September in North Waziristan 
region.  Rice said that the Taliban "is designated as a global terrorist 
organisation under an executive order and work is being done to 
designate it as a foreign terrorist organisation," in response to a 
query from Republican Congressman Mark Steven Kirk.  Kirk asked, “I 
think 26 other organisations, including Hamas, are designated as foreign 
terrorist organisations. Can we go ahead and, sort of, go with the 
common sense and designate the Taliban as a terrorist organisation?”
	In Iraq, Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni Arab praised the 
Sunni Arab guerrillas as "honorable" and "sincere" and said that the 
Iraqi government and the US must negotiate with them ... He also lashed 
out at the Association of Muslim Scholars, a hard line Sunni religious 
group that has been deeply critical of people like al-Hashimi for 
serving in a government they see as American puppets.

[2] TORTURERS. In regard to Osama bin Laden, Rice said, “it is not a 
one-man show, and we have captured and killed significant — that 
significant field generalship leadership of al-Qaeda, people like Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubayda {and, in fact, in Iraq, Zarqawi}, and 
the people who operationally run things, we have made a real dent in 
that leadership,” she added.
	The US semi-official radio, NPR, reported on June 29, 2006 that "the 
United States is using torture" and quotes *The One Percent Doctrine*, 
by Ron Suskind to describe the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid 
Sheik Mohammed, the examples Rice chose. "Suskind says pressure to 
generate intelligence came from the top. President Bush took a hands-on 
approach to monitoring interrogations after the Sept. 11 attacks. 'He 
was interested in a very specific, granular way all the time. He was 
constantly asking folks inside of CIA, "What's happening with 
interrogations? Are these techniques working? Can we trust what we get?" 
The president ... is involved -- some people say too involved -- in the 
granular day-to-day grit of this war on terror.'"
	"In March 2002, amid criticism over the failure to capture Osama bin 
Laden and other al-Qaida leaders, Zubaydah, a suspected member of the 
terrorist group, was captured in Pakistan. President Bush touted 
Zubaydah as a key player, but U.S. intelligence officials considered him 
a lower-level 'recruiter/travel agent,' Suskind says. 'What that 
disparity drives is a ferocious interrogation protocol for Abu 
Zubaydah,' Suskind says. Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during 
his capture, was helped back to health, then tortured, the author says. 
'And this man, mentally unbalanced, clearly so, basically begins to talk 
about everything under the sun,' Suskind says. Zubaydah's tips that 
major U.S. landmarks were targeted for terrorist attacks proved to be 
largely unfounded. 'Virtually none of them were targets,' Suskind says.
	And regarding what the Bush policy did to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 
presumed operational director of the 9-11 attacks, on this past Tuesday 
night there was a private screening of Rory Kennedy's fim, "Ghosts of 
Abu Ghraib" in Washington. The awful Sen. Lindsey Graham offered 
remarks, "acknowledging the need for torture and [saying] we did not 
even want us to know all of what they did to Khalid Shiekh Mohammed 
because it was just so awful, but he assured us Khalid Sheik Mohammed 
provided 'really great' information, [and asserted that] "most Americans 
think this is an unfortunate necessity in the global war on terrorism."
	If so, we might wonder why the USG finds it so important to keep secret 
what is being done in our name.  The US outraged Spain this week by 
refusing to make available another of its ghost prisoners, the man 
supposed to be in overall charge of the rail bombings in Spain, as the 
trial of suspects opened in Madrid.
	We also might wonder why the USG passed a law, the Military Commissions 
Act 0f 2006, saying that American officials who torture can't be 
punished.  We know they are using their immunity.  Mohammad's children, 
aged nine and seven, were taken into custody in September 2003, 
apparently in an attempt to force their father to give himself up as a 
member of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.  Reports emerged that they were flown 
to the US in March 2003, though the CIA and the Pakistan government 
denied it. The whereabouts of the children is still unknown.
	The US Department of Justice has implemented a secretive new prison 
program segregating "high-security-risk" Muslim and Middle Eastern 
prisoners and tightly restricting their communications with the outside 
world in apparent violation of federal law.  Quietly implemented in 
December, the special "Communications Management Unit" (CMU)  targeting 
Muslim and Middle-Eastern inmates was not implemented through the 
process required by federal law, which stipulates the public be notified 
of any new changes to prison programs and be given the opportunity to 
voice objections. Instead, the program appears to have been ordered and 
implemented by a senior official at the Department of Justice ...the CMU 
program, instituted Dec. 11, 2006 -- shortly after the mid-term 
elections in which Democrats won both chambers of Congress -- is being 
implemented at Terre Haute Federal Correctional Institution in Indiana.

[3] PROVOCATIONS. The USG has sent another aircraft carrier, the John C. 
Stennis, to the Persian Gulf, this one named for a US senator who as a 
young prosecutor, ought the conviction and execution of three black men 
whose murder confessions had been extracted by torture. The convictions 
were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case of Brown 
v. Mississippi (1936) that banned the use of evidence obtained by 
torture. (A principle reversed by the Military Commissions Act.)
	Meanwhile, Iran's Revolutionary Guards has engraved the military 
organization's emblem into the side panel of an American warship 
stationed in the Persian Gulf.  The symbol was etched onto the ship by 
the crew of a submarine that had managed to reach the U.S. vessel 
without detection.  [Haaretz]

[4] The House of Representatives passed a pusillanimous resolution* 
against the surge by a smaller margin than expected, including 17 
Republicans, among them our own congressman, illustrating the importance 
of pressure on our federal representatives.  The Administration 
responded accurately that the resolution had no legal force.
	The Senate failed to consider the same resolution because the Democrats 
refused to do it without 60 votes; they did have seven Republicans 
voting with them.
	One of the legal architects of the American torture program, John Yoo, 
repeated in the NYT this week the Republicans' accurate observation that 
the constitutional way for Congress to limit the war was not by 
resolution but by limiting funding, which Senate Democrats could do with 
41 votes (by filibustering the funding bills), or approve in an 
acceptable form with 51 votes (as the Republicans taught them how to do 
in the last Congress, in regard to judgeships).

[5] An EU report on US torture flights in Europe documents 1,245 in the 
period 2001-05.  The German government responded by saying that they 
wanted to make it a crime throughout the EU to say that genocide did not 
occur in Germany, Turkey, or Yugoslavia.

[6] Russia threatens to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range 
Nuclear Forces Treaty (as the US withdrew from tht 1972 ABM treaty), if 
the US installs missile components in Poland and the Czech Republic.

[7] The NK nuclear deal is attacked by outraged neocons John Bolton and 
Eliot Abrams.  One of the craziest of the neocons, Frank Gaffney, says 
opponents of the war in the Congress should be charged with treason.

[8] Times (UK): Giants Meet to Counter US Power.  India, China and 
Russia account for 40 per cent of the world’s population, a fifth of its 
economy and more than half of its nuclear warheads. Now they appear to 
be forming a partnership to challenge the US-dominated world order that 
has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. Foreign ministers from the 
three emerging giants met in Delhi yesterday [Valentine's Day] to 
discuss ways to build a more democratic “multipolar world”. It was the 
second such meeting in the past two years and came after an 
unprecedented meeting between their respective leaders, Manmohan Singh, 
Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin, during the G8 summit in St Petersburg in 
July. It also came only four days after Mr Putin stunned Western 
officials by railing against American foreign policy at a security 
conference in Munich.
	The trilateral relationship between India, China and Russia was first 
proposed by Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian prime minister, during 
a visit to New Delhi in 1998.
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* "Resolution of the Spineless." Text of the Democratic resolution 
expressing disapproval of President Bush's troop increase in Iraq that 
the House passed this week:
	Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), that -
	(1) Congress and the American people will continue to support and 
protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or 
who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq; and
	(2) Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush 
announced on January 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional 
United States combat troops to Iraq. [AP]

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