[Peace] News notes 041212

[C. G. Estabrook]

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	Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism" [GWOT],
	for the AWARE meeting, Sunday, December 12, 2004.
	(Sources provided on request; a paragraph followed by a
	bracketed source is substantially verbatim.)
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[1. AMERICAN TORTURERS] Over the past few weeks, the number of different
accounts of torture and abuse by the United States has been staggering.
Here is a quick run-down of some of the most recent:
	- The Pentagon warned intelligence specialists as recently as June
not to report the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
	- FBI agents witnessed US soldiers abusing detainees at Guantanamo
Bay as early 2002 but the Pentagon did little to investigate the
complaints.
	- New photographs emerge showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi
detainees as early as May 2003.
	- The U.S. government argues it has the right to use evidence
gained by torture in deciding whether to detain people at Guantanamo Bay.
	- U.S. generals in Iraq were warned more than a month before the
Abu Ghraib scandal emerged that detainees were being beaten and abused in
Iraq.
	- The Red Cross accuses the U.S. pf physical and psychological
torture at Guantanamo.
	- The US government is leasing a special Gulfstream Jet to
transport detained suspects to other nations that routinely use torture in
their prisons.
	- On June 15, 2003, Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, a counterintelligence
agent in the National Guard stationed in Samarra told his commanding
officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of
torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal
investigation. Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30
years of military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered
by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney. He was then
strapped down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac'd to a military
medical center outside the country -- even though there was nothing wrong
with him.
	Those are just some of the latest accounts of torture and abuse in
the press over the last weeks. Over the next four years, more are certain
to emerge with the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General.
Gonzales helped pave the legal groundwork that led to the torture of
detainees at Abu Ghraib. In 2002 he claimed in a memo that the war on
terrorism renders obsolete portions of the Geneva Conventions. [Democracy
Now]

[2. THE WAR IN IRAQ] A WP reporter describes spending a few days
patrolling with GIs in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city. His unit ran into
repeated ambushes, and he writes that "elections have barely registered in
the frightened day-to-day life of most people" there. No voter education
offices have opened in the city. And Iraqi security forces are "in
shambles." About 90 percent of Mosul's police have deserted. One American
sergeant described the Iraqi soldiers accompanying his unit as "our
biggest liability. These guys are awful." [Reminds one of the "Ruff-puffs"
-- the Regional Forces/Popular Forces that the US tried to establish in
its attack on South Vietnam.]
	On Thursday, guerrillas stormed a police station in Samara and
looted the weapons inside. Also, Samara's police chief resigned. There
were also clashes in Mosul, Ramadi, and Baghdad, killing about a
half-dozen Iraqi troops and civilians. The Post says in Ramadi,
"Insurgents roamed openly on the city's west side." [SLATE]
	A front-page Post story headlines some "U.S. military intelligence
officials" saying that insurgents in Iraq are getting serious support from
former regime types holed up in Syria. Then in the 14th paragraph, the
Post acknowledges that some other officials think that's B.S. and that the
U.S. still doesn't know much about the insurgents. "We don't know where
the enemy is," said one official. The article also has more pessimism on
the current situation. One defense official said the Green Zone itself is
"overrun with agents" from the insurgency. Apparently, when a big convoy
leaves the zone, Iraqi cellphone calls from there surge. [SLATE]
	In Canada, A former United States marine told a refugee hearing
for an American war dodger Tuesday that trigger-happy U.S. soldiers in
Iraq routinely killed unarmed woman and children, and murdered other
Iraqis in violation of international law.  In chilling testimony intended
to bolster the asylum claim of compatriot Jeremy Hinzman, former staff
sergeant Jimmy Massey recounted how nervous soldiers trained to believe
that all Iraqis were potential terrorists often opened fire
indiscriminately ... On several occasions, his soldiers pumped hundreds of
bullets into cars that failed to stop at U.S. military checkpoints,
killing all occupants -- who were later found to be unarmed, Massey said.
On another occasion, marines reacted to a stray bullet by killing a small
group of unarmed protesters and bystanders, said Massey, who said he
suffers from nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder. [Canadian
Press]

[3. KEEPING THE GWOT GOING] The Bush administration says the prospect of
Iran's obtaining a nuclear weapon is "intolerable," and from the White
House to the State Department, officials express considerable skepticism
that Europe's efforts to negotiate quietly an end to Iran's nuclear
activities will succeed ... a disagreement between the Bush administration
and European leaders over how best to persuade Iran to abandon its
suspected nuclear weapons program has deepened in recent weeks, diplomats
on both sides say. [NYT]
	The Bush administration has tapped telephone conversations that
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei had with
Iranian diplomats in search of ammunition to oust him from his post, The
Washington Post reported on Sunday. [REUTERS]
	A new article in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs has
accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence on North
Korea's nuclear program in a similar fashion to its use of weapons of mass
destruction to justify the war on Iraq. The author, Selig Harrison, writes
"Relying on sketchy data, the Bush administration presented a worst-case
scenario as an incontrovertible truth and distorted its intelligence on
North Korea, seriously exaggerating the danger that Pyongyang is secretly
making uranium-based nuclear weapons." Harrison chairs the Task Force on
Korean Policy, a grouping of former senior US military officials,
diplomats and Korean specialists. Agence France Press reports that the
Task Force issued a report today calling on the US immediately to back
down on its insistence that North Korea come clean on its alleged uranium
program.
	A senior CIA operative who handled sensitive informants in Iraq
asserts that CIA managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of
mass destruction and retaliated against him after he refused. The
operative, who remains under cover, claims in a lawsuit made public this
week that a co-worker warned him in 2001 "that CIA management planned to
'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA
dogma."

[4. COSTS OF WAR] ABC News is reporting that rising costs of the war in
Iraq and Afghanistan will force Bush administration to seek from Congress
tens of millions of dollars more than anticipated just months ago. The
administration had estimated it would seek between $60 and $75 billion
from Congress. But now Congressional sources say the request may be as
high as $100 billion.
	The New England Journal of Medicine article is reporting that the
US is facing a "severe shortage of surgeons in Iraq" to treat wounded
soldiers. It is now estimated that more soldiers have been injured in Iraq
than during the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or the first five
years of the Vietnam conflict.
	Just in time for Xmas, US veterans from the war in Iraq are
beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country, and
advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless
vets not seen since the Vietnam era.  [UPI]
	So Donald Rumsfeld faced some tougher questions than expected
during his "pep talk" at Camp Buehring in Kuwait. One soldier, Army Spc.
Thomas Wilson, asked, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local
landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to
uparmor our vehicles?"  A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300
soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the
secretary of defense. "You have to dig through the landfills," Rumsfeld
replied, "because we're conducting an experiment in nation-building that
has neither gone as planned nor was really planned for very well.  Now we
are trapped in an intractable ground war with an insurgency we created.
Oh, and we're fighting it using a woefully understaffed, undersupplied
fighting force we deployed on erroneous assumptions. We fucked up, Tommy.
Now I must ask you to re-enlist." [Actually, that's not what Rumsfeld said
-- just what he should have said, according to wonkette.com]
	More than a billion children -- over half the children in the
world -- suffer extreme deprivation because of war, H.I.V./AIDS or
poverty, according to a report released this week by the United Nations
Children's Fund.

[5. AMERICAN GESTAPO] Everyone's heard of the withdrawal of the venal
crook Bernard Kerik, who Bush nominated as head of Homeland Security.
	ABC News is reporting that the Inspector General for the
Department of Homeland Security has lost his job after he filed a series
of critical reports about the department's management and security plans.
In his year-end report, Clark Ervin alleged that millions of dollars have
been wasted or are unaccounted for by the department. He also issued
another report that the department had illegally paid Boeing an extra $50
million for one project. In other reports Ervin exposed severe lapses in
airport security checkpoints and on how the country screened for nuclear
materials at U.S. ports.
	PATRIOT II lives in the enforcement powers, attached to the
intelligence bill with little debate in Congress, that weaken civil
liberties and privacy rights.

[6. DANGEROUS SPYING] Congress' new blueprint for U.S. intelligence
spending includes a mysterious and expensive spy program that drew
extraordinary criticism from leading Democrats, with one saying the highly
classified project is a threat to national security ... the program was
almost certainly a spy satellite system, perhaps with technology to
destroy potential attackers.
	India and Russia are putting together their space technology
skills to build an ambitious navigational satellite project that would
have both civilian and military applications, the Indo-Asian News Service
(IANS) reported Thursday.

[7. WHAT'S NOT BEING SAID] Two CIA assessments of Iraq are "much more
pessimistic than the public picture being offered by the Bush
administration," accordining to the NYT. The reports say things are about
to get worse.  One comes form the departing CIA station chief in Baghdad,
the other from Michael Kostiw, a key aide to new CIA chief Porter Goss,
hence from both the pro-Bush and anti-Bush factions of the CIA.
	The Army lied about the death of NFL player CPL. Pat Tillman by
"friendly fire." The Armay first said that Tillman was killed in an
"intense fire fight" with enemy combatants (LAT), but it's since come to
light that his death was the result of an ill-conceived order by a
commander that moved Tillman's group into the line of fire of a
heavily-armed Army Humvee, whose gunners mistook Tillman and company for
Afghan soldiers and open fired. [SLATE]

[8. FOR-PROFIT MEDIA] Clear Channel Communications has picked Fox News
Radio to be the primary source of national news for most of its news and
talk stations, officials announced this week. The five-year agreement
initially covers more than 100 radio stations.

[9. DEATH OF AN UNKNOWN REPORTER] Gary Webb, 49, a Pulitzer-winning
investigative reporter who became best known for a widely-criticized
series linking the CIA to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, was
found dead Friday after an apparent suicide, authorities in Sacramento
said. He suffered a gunshot wound to the head ... His series for the San
Jose Mercury News in 1996 held that that drug traffickers had sold tons of
crack from Colombia in L.A.'s black neighborhoods, then funneled millions
to the CIA-backed contras in Nicaragua. [E&P] For the full story on how
the press buried Webb's expose, read Whiteout: CIA, Drugs & the Press, by
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

[10. WELL, THEY DON'T HAVE MUCH OIL] The International Rescue Committee is
estimating over 1,000 people are still dying each day in the Democratic
Republic of Congo as a result of the ongoing war that began in 1998. The
group estimates a total of 3.8 million people have now died over the past
six years -- making it the bloodiest war since World War II.

  ==============================================================
  C. G. Estabrook
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
  office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466
  <www.newsfromneptune.com> <www.carlforcongress.org>
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  [A corporation] is an unaccountable private tyranny
  in which power comes from above, from the owners and the managers ...
  At the very bottom people have the right to rent themselves to this
  tyrannical system. It is essentially unaccountable to the public ...
  if you look at [corporations'] intellectual roots ...
  they come out of the same neo-Hegelian conceptions of the rights of
  organic entities that led to bolshevism and fascism.
  We have three forms of twentieth century totalitarianism: bolshevism,
  fascism and the corporation. Two of them, fortunately, were dissolved,
  disappeared mostly. The third remains. It shouldn't.
  Power should be in the hands of populations. --Noam Chomsky
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