[Peace] News notes 2006-01-01

[Carl Estabrook]

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        Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism,"
        for the New Year's Day 2006 meeting of AWARE, the
        "Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort" of Champaign-Urbana.
        (Sources provided on request; paragraphs followed
	by a bracketed source are substantially verbatim.)
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	"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
	--Thomas Jefferson

[1] The death toll for U.S. soldiers in Iraq stands at 844 for 2005.
That's four fewer than the year before. The US claims not to know how many
Iraqis died as a result of the occupation in 2005. "Bush and Blair plot
their exit strategy, as Iraq falls apart at the seams: 2005 was the year
in which the US admitted it was not going to defeat the insurgency. It was
the ebb tide of American and British power in Iraq." [P. Cockburn]

[2] Bush defended domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency
Sunday [by saying] "We're at war."  Sunday's New York Times reports that
... James Comey, a deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, was
concerned about the legality of the National Security Agency's
surveillance program and refused to extend it in 2004 ... Bush authorized
the NSA to monitor, without court approval, the international telephone
calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens [but] a 1978 law, the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, makes it illegal to spy on U.S. citizens in
the United States without the approval of a special court ... The refusal
by Comey [who's also responsible for hiring independent prosecutor Patrick
Fitzgerald] to reauthorize the NSA program prompted Card and Gonzales to
try to get the needed approval from Ashcroft in March 2004 while he was in
a Washington hospital for gallbladder surgery ... [he] also appeared
reluctant ... It was unclear if the White House persuaded Ashcroft to
approve the program or proceeded without it. [Reuters]

[3] [In Iraq] "Fuel chaos developed in a land with the world's
third-largest oil reserves," the WSJournal observes. With one major
refinery closed due to insurgent threats, and with the government rolling
back Hussein-era subsidies [at the behest of IMF], gas prices have
recently tripled. The incumbent oil minister, a critic of the price
increases, was replaced with Chalabi, fresh from his poor showing in the
election.  [Slate]

[4] Elsewhere in Iraq, U.S. fighter jets have killed ten people in a
bombing of the northern village of Hawija. The military said it launched
the attacks after several men were spotted planting roadside bombs. The
Washington Post reported earlier this week the number of monthly U.S.
airstrikes has increased almost fivefold this year, from roughly 25 in
January to 120 last month. [DN]

[5] The New York Times is reporting the US military is planning to
increase the number of personnel advising and monitoring Iraqi police
units ... In one case, the Times reports an entire US battalion, on
average numbering more than 500 soldiers, will be attached to a particular
Iraqi brigade. [DN]

[6] The US stock market was stagnant in 2005, while Japan's rose 40
percent (its best performance since 1986), and markets in Britain, France,
and Germany rose between 15 and 30 percent. [There are other indications
of a US business decline in 2006.  For most Americans, of course, economic
conditions continued to decline in 2005, as inequality grew.] [Slate]

[7] The Justice Department has launched an investigation into the leak
that produced the Dec. 16 NYT report on domestic spying by the National
Security Agency. [In a particularly inane comment], a Justice Departmenat
sokesman said, "... Al Qaeda's playbook is not printed on Page 1, and when
America's is, it has serious ramifications." [WT]

[8] The Washington Post reports new details of the covert CIA program
enacted shortly after 9/11 by the Bush administration ...the program,
known by its initials GST, is the largest CIA covert initiative since the
height of the Cold War. It includes ... the kidnapping of terror suspects
abroad, the maintenance of secret prisons in at least eight foreign
countries, the use of interrogation techniques considered illegal under
international law, and the operation of a fleet of aircraft to move
detainees around the globe. Powers authorized by President Bush include
permitting the CIA to create paramilitary teams to hunt and kill
designated individuals anywhere in the world. The Post reports the CIA is
working to establish procedures that would allow for the quick cremation
of a detainees body in the event the detainee dies in custody. A
government official [is quoted as saying]: "Everything is done in the name
of self-defense, so they can do anything because nothing is forbidden in
the war powers act. It's an amazing legal justification that allows them
to do anything." [DN]

[9] A five-month hunger strike at the US military prison at Guantanamo now
involves at least 84 detainees. The US military said 46 detainees joined
the strike last Sunday, on Christmas Day. [DN]

[10] Imprisoned Haitian priest Gerard Jean-Juste has cancer Dr. Paul
Farmer says Jean-Juste's leukemia is not immediately fatal but can but
can develop into a more virulent strain of cancer. Jean-Juste was
imprisoned in July on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Haitian
journalist Jaques Roches -- a murder that occurred while Jean-Juste was in
Miami. He has not been formally charged. Before his arrest, Jean-Juste was
considered to be the leading candidate to run for the ousted President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide s Family Lavalas party in Haiti s upcoming
elections. Amnesty International has called him a prisoner of conscience.
 [The elections have just been postponed for the fourth time.] [DN]

[11] The Associated Press is reporting the Indonesian military has
acknowledged that an American gold company had been providing direct
"support" to army units accused of human rights abuses in the remote
province of Papua. The army says New Orleans-based Freeport-McMoRan Copper
& Gold has provided it with vehicles, fuel and meals directly to the units
in the field." On Tuesday, the New York Times reported Freeport has paid
at least $20 million to Indonesian military commanders to protect the
company s facilities in Papua. [DN]

[12] The Pentagon is saying a military program to fund news websites that
pays journalists to promote US policies in Europe and Africa does not
violate federal law. This according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
A review was ordered in February following disclosures the US was paying
Virginia contractor Anteon to run websites without proper attribution to
promote US policies in the Balkans and the Africa s Maghreb region.
Meanwhile, an inquiry continues into the Washington, D.C.-based Pentagon
contractor the Lincoln Group over the disclosure it planted pro-military
stories in Iraqi newspapers. [DN]

[13] A former US counterterrorism agent is claiming the CIA's rendition
program ... was launched under former president Clinton. In an interview
with the German newspaper Die Zeit, Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran
who resigned last year, said : "President Clinton, his national security
advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clarke ordered the
CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda. We asked the president what
we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."
In February, investigative journalist Jane Meyer reported the Clinton
administration carried out rendition operations as early as 1995. Meyer
reported US agents helped kidnap wanted Egyptian terror suspect Qassem in
Zagreb in Croatia. He was sent back to Egypt, where he was reportedly
executed. [DN]

[14] Bush has summoned editors from the Washington Post and New York Times
to the White House at least twice in recent months to request the paper's
hold stories.  Today, "New York Times ombudsman Byron Calame rips the
paper's Executive Editor and Publisher for refusing to provide any
explanation for why they held the NSA story for a year before deciding to
publish it and whether they saved Bush s re-election by doing so." [PBD]

[15] [The right-wing Jerusalem Post says that] The United States
government reportedly began coordinating with NATO its plans for a
possible military attack against Iran. The German newspaper Der
Tagesspiegel collected various reports from the German media indicating
that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are examining the prospects of
such a strike. According to the report, CIA Director Porter Goss, in his
last visit to Turkey on December 12, requested Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan to provide military bases to the United States in 2006 from where
they would be able to launch an assault. [JP]

[16] [The Sunday Times/UK says that] NORTH KOREA is working to restart a
reactor that would produce enough plutonium to make 10 atomic bombs a
year, a leading American nuclear scientist [claims]. Siegfried Hecker,
former director of the US government's Los Alamos laboratory, [said] "They
have the plutonium," he said.  "We have to assume the North Koreans can
and have made a few nuclear devices." [Some suggest that NK will] stand
alongside Iran to confront the Americans over their right to have nuclear
weapons... Hecker said his main fear is that North Korea s impoverished
regime might sell material to terrorists. [ST/UK]

[17] [In Egypt, one of the countries the US says it is democratizing] a
police raid on a Sudanese-refugee squatter camp in downtown Cairo killed
least 23 refugees. About 2,000 refugees from Sudan had for three months
been squatting on a large traffic island in a posh neighborhood of Cairo,
across from the offices of the U.N.'s refugee agency. (The United Nations
has denied Sudanese emigrants refugee status since warring factions in
Sudan signed a peace treaty earlier this year.) After months of fruitless
negotiations with the squatters, the U.N. office told the police it
thought the refugees might attack. About 3,000 police surrounded the
refugees, tried to drag them into buses, shot them with water cannons, and
then went in with batons swinging. Some Sudanese fought back with bottles
and poles.  The police took the Sudanese to several detention centers ...
at least half of the dead were women and children. [Slate]

[18] The Washington Post [on Saturday had a good account of the lobbyist]
Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and a curious "grassroots" advocacy group called
the U.S. Family Network: its funding came almost exclusively from a
handful of corporations with lobbying ties to Abramoff. Most of the
corporations had no interest in the advocacy group's self-described
"moral-fitness" agenda but did have an interest in legislation before
Congress. DeLay, then a member of the House leadership, made fundraising
calls for the group from its offices, which at times also housed DeLay's
political action committee. Despite raising $2.5 million over its
five-year existence, the group never had more than one full-time staff
member and never did much advocacy. [Slate]

[19] In defiance of the British government, Craig Murray, the former
British ambassador to Uzbekistan, has published confidential documents
that show the Foreign Office knowingly obtained information from the Uzbek
security forces that was extracted by torture. Murray served as ambassador
to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004. He was forced out after he openly
criticized the British and US governments for supporting human rights
abuses under the Uzbek regime. [DN]

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  C. G. Estabrook, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
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