Mr. de president, slaap zacht!

[Barst]

En nu ook nog twee rasechte havik-unilateralisten als U.S.-vertegenwoordiger binnen multilaterale organisaties: John Bolton als V.N.-ambassadeur en Paul Wolfowitz als chairman van de Wereldbank... Dat belooft!

Zoals al gezegd na het bezoek aan Europa: 'Actions speak louder than words' - Q.E.D.!

Gelukkig slapen ze daar nog niet allemaal, zie onderstaand artikel...


Congres tegen uitbesteden folteringen

Van onze redacteur


BRUSSEL - Het Amerikaanse Congres eist dat de VS geen martelpraktijken meer uitbesteden aan andere landen. President George Bush repliceert dat als de VS mensen repatriëren, ze telkens de belofte krijgen dat die niet worden gemarteld. Die beloften zijn een lachertje, zegt een anonieme CIA-agent.


Het nieuws lekte begin maart uit: de Amerikaanse geheime dienst CIA laat vermeende terroristen voor ondervraging opsluiten in landen die folteren. Er is sprake van 100 tot 150 personen sinds de aanslagen van 11 september 2001. De Verenigde Staten gebruikten die praktijk al voor die fatale dag, maar veel minder en ze controleerden de hele zaak veel nauwgezetter.

Het Amerikaanse Huis van Afgevaardigden stemde woensdag in met de besteding van 60,87 miljard euro voor dringende uitgaven die de oorlog en heropbouw in Afghanistan en Irak met zich meebrengen. De gekozenen verboden in één adem, met 420 stemmen tegen 2, dat de overheid geld zou gebruiken om verdachten over te vliegen naar landen die folteren.

President Bush kon het vraagstuk door de houding van het Amerikaanse parlement niet langer uit de weg gaan: ,,In de wereld na 9/11 moeten de Verenigde Staten hun bevolking en hun vrienden tegen aanvallen verdedigen. Een manier om dat te doen, is mensen te arresteren en ze terug te sturen naar hun land van oorsprong, mits de belofte dat ze niet zullen worden gefolterd. We krijgen die belofte. Deze staat gelooft niet in martelen. We geloven in zelfverdediging.''

Die beloften zijn een lachertje, zei een CIA-agent die bij de operaties betrokken is, aan de krant The Washington Post. ,,Het gaat om veel meer dan dat'', vertelden regeringsambtenaren die gevangenissen in het buitenland bezochten waar de CIA verdachten dropte. ,,Het is heel duidelijk dat ze daar ondervragingstechnieken toepassen die in de Verenigde Staten verboden zijn.''

De geheime dienst evalueert het systeem en leden van het Amerikaanse Congres vragen een diepgaand onderzoek. Canada, Zweden, Duitsland en Italië zijn al aan het onderzoeken in welke mate hun geheime diensten deelnemen aan die CIA-activiteiten.

Maher Arar, een Canadees van Syrische oorsprong, was het slachtoffer van die praktijken. De Amerikanen namen hem op de luchthaven JFK van New York gevangen en zetten hem op het vliegtuig naar Syrië. Hij vloog er een jaar in de cel waar hij werd geslagen. Mamdouh Habib, een Australiër van Egyptische oorsprong, zegt te hebben vastgezeten in Pakistan, Egypte, Afghanistan en Guantánamo Bay op Cuba. De Verenigde Staten lieten hem in januari gaan.


18/03/2005 Boudewijn Vanpeteghem

©Copyright De Standaard

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In a warped reality - Two years on, the occupiers justify the war by embracing the irrelevant and ignoring the inconvenient

Gary Younge


03/21/05 "The Guardian" - - This is a tale of one war, two anniversaries, three different demonstrations - and inconsistencies, contradictions and civilian deaths that are too numerous to count.


On April 18 2003, tens of thousands of Sunni and Shia protesters took to the streets of Baghdad to call for the Americans to leave Iraq. "You are the masters today," Ahmed al-Kubeisy, the prayer leader, told the Americans as he addressed the men emerging from Friday prayers. "But I warn you against thinking of staying. Get out before we kick you out."

Two years later, the US is still there. The anti-American protest was hailed in the White House as a vindication for the US strategy of bombing and then occupying the country. "In Iraq, there's discussion, debate, protest - all the hallmarks of liberty," said President George Bush that week. "The path to freedom may not always be neat and orderly, but it is the right of every person and every nation."

On February 22 2005, tens of thousands of Lebanese protesters took to the streets of Beirut to call for the Syrians to leave the country. Within a week the Syrians announced indefinite plans to leave. Front covers of magazines carried pictures of pretty young Lebanese women waving flags (at last, some Arabs editors could fancy) proclaiming a "cedar revolution" and "people power". The protest was hailed in the White House as a vindication for the US strategy of bombing and occupying Iraq. "By now it should be clear that authoritarian rule is not the wave of the future," said Bush. "We want that democracy in Lebanon to succeed, and we know it cannot succeed so long as she is occupied by a foreign power."

On March 8 2005, 500,000 pro-Syrian protesters took to the streets of Beirut to oppose US and European interference. The demonstration was backed by Hizbullah, which the US has branded a terrorist organisation. People carried banners saying "Death to America". It was several times bigger than the first anti-Syrian protest. They too waved Lebanese flags. But editors didn't find them pretty. They did not appear on the front pages of the news magazines. Their protest was not hailed in the White House. In fact, its existence was barely acknowledged.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side," George Orwell once wrote. "He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

So it is on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, where the occupying powers are still so desperate to create a moral framework to justify the war that embracing the irrelevant and ignoring the inconvenient has become the only viable strategy left to them.

We have entered a world where reality - like the photographs of torture or the absence of weapons of mass destruction - is just a minor blockage in a flood of official, upbeat declarations and statements. Each new dispatch from the departments of irony on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that truth can be created by assertion, principle can be established by deception and democracy can be imposed through aggression. These people would claim credit for the good weather and deny responsibility for their own signature if they thought they could get away with it.

Two years on, the death toll keeps rising, the size of the "coalition" keeps shrinking and global public support for this reckless occupation has maintained its downward spiral from a low base. Indeed, the only thing that changes is the rationale for starting the war, where the sophistry of the occupying powers keeps plumbing new depths and selective amnesia has attained new highs.

We are supposed to believe that there is no link between the American shooting of an Italian intelligence agent on a rescue mission and Rome's decision to withdraw its troops 10 days later. "I don't see a connection there," says the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan. We are supposed to remember Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds 17 years ago in graphic detail and forget everything that happened in Abu Ghraib 16 months ago.

"If our guys want to poke somebody in the chest to get the name of a bomb maker so they can save the lives of Americans, I'm for it," said Republican senator Jim Talent at a recent hearing on torture. How about ramming someone who does not have the name of a bomb maker in the anus with a truncheon, Mr Talent. Are you for that too?

Most recently, we have been told to believe that the limited and as yet untested moves towards democracy in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the thawing in Palestinian-Israeli relations (largely the result of Yasser Arafat's death) and the proposed withdrawal of Syrian troops (prompted by an outcry over the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri) all justify the bombing.

As further proof they point to January's elections in Iraq. This was a vote that the Americans wanted to postpone, in which many people could not participate, that produced a victory for Islamists with close ties to Iran who want the US troops out as soon as possible. If all of this amounts to victory, I would hate to see what their idea of defeat looks like.

The truth is that you cannot even begin to make a justification for the war unless you take into account the lives of innocent Iraqis lost as a result of it. The simplest way to deal with that is to pretend that these deaths do not exist - the occupying powers simply do not count them. The only other defence is that their deaths are a price worth paying and that good things can come from bad acts - a claim every bit as offensive and wrong-headed as arguing that 9/11 was a price worth paying for waking America up to the consequences of its foreign policy.

But the Iraqis are not the only ones to have suffered these past two years. While the occupiers have been busy failing to export democracy abroad, they have been busy undermining it at home. All of them lied to their electorates about the reasons for going to war. With the exception of America, all of them went to war despite overwhelming opposition from the public. And through their anti-terrorist bills and patriot acts they have removed some of the most basic legal rights of their citizens and criminalised the most vulnerable.

The elections last year in Spain and recent events in Italy are encouraging. They show that while the anti-war movement failed to stop the war, it has maintained a sufficiently effective presence to make a crucial difference at key moments to disable and discredit it.

In the meantime, the department of irony will keep moulding its own version of reality until it is sufficiently warped to fit its own agenda. US troop withdrawal, said Bush last week, "would be done depending upon the ability of Iraqis to defend themselves". They are already defending themselves Mr Bush - from you.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

Copyright: The Guardian, 21-03-2005

[Barst]

VN / Republikeinen geven Bolton niet zomaar op


Aanhoudend negatieve verhalen over de beoogde Amerikaanse VN-ambassadeur John Bolton brengen de regering-Bush steeds verder in verlegenheid.


De Republikeinen hopen vandaag de rangen gesloten te houden en de benoeming van John Bolton tot VN-ambassadeur door de senaatscommissie van buitenlandse zaken te loodsen. Dan zou Bolton zeker zijn van zijn nieuwe baan, want de officiële goedkeuring door de voltallige Senaat is een formaliteit.

Voor de Republikeinen moet de stemming, die vorige week werd uitgesteld, echt vandaag komen. De partij gaat zich steeds ongemakkelijker voelen omdat er elke dag nieuwe verhalen opduiken over Boltons vermoedelijke wangedrag. Bolton was de afgelopen vier jaar onderminister voor buitenlandse zaken. De verhalen brengen de regering-Bush meer en meer in verlegenheid.

Critici zeggen al lang dat het Witte Huis informatie over de geheime wapens van de verdreven Iraakse leider Saddam Hoessein opgeklopt, verdraaid of selectief gebruikt heeft om de oorlog te kunnen voeren die ze al lang plande. Het Witte Huis heeft dat steeds ontkend. Het zette de centrale inlichtingendienst CIA nooit onder druk. Die zou zelf de plank helemaal misgeslagen hebben.

Het eindrapport van de onderzoekscommissie naar het falen van de geheime diensten bij Irak enkele weken geleden, leek de regering in het gelijk te stellen. De commissie zei geen bewijs te hebben gevonden dat de regering geheim agenten ooit dwong analyses te veranderen. Net toen het Witte Huis de vlag buiten gehangen had, blies de benoeming van Bolton die oude verhalen nieuw leven in.

Bolton zou, zo getuigden leden van de geheime dienst van buitenlandse zaken in een hoorzitting, zijn uiterste best hebben gedaan om informatie over massavernietigingswapens naar zijn hand te zetten. Agenten die zijn alarmerende kijk op vooral Cuba en Syrië betwistten, probeerde hij ontslagen te krijgen. Hij was een serial abuser, iemand die stelselmatig kritisch personeel uitschold en vernederde.

The Washington Post berichtte gisteren ook dat Bolton vaak informatie over Iran, Irak en Noord-Korea achterhield voor minister Colin Powell en diens opvolger, Condoleezza Rice. In de hoop het beleid in neoconservatieve richting bij te sturen. Hij zou daarvoor ook een eigen achterdeurtje naar de CIA hebben geopend.

Republikeinse senator Chuck Hagel waarschuwde afgelopen weekend dat er geen grote nieuwe onthullingen bij moesten komen. Anders zou hij tegenstemmen. Dan zouden de stemmen in de commissie staken en was de benoeming van de baan.

Maar de Republikeinse voorzitter bleef optimistisch dat de Republikeinen als blok vóór zouden stemmen. ,,Ik denk niet dat het oordeel van leden verandert -ook als er nieuwe informatie naar buiten komt.''


Trouw, 19-04-2005

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There is no war on terrorism


04/27/05 "SMH" - The so-called global war on terrorism does not exist, a high-ranking army officer has declared in a speech that challenges the conventional political wisdom.


In a frank speech, Brigadier Justin Kelly dismissed several of the central tenets of the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, saying the "war" part is all about politics and terrorism is merely a tactic.

Although such wars were fuelled by global issues, they were essentially counter-insurgent operations fought on a local level. This would result in Australian soldiers fighting in increasingly urban environments.

Speaking at a conference on future warfighting, Brigadier Kelly, the director-general of future land warfare, also suggested that the "proposition you can bomb someone into thinking as we do has been found to be untrue".

His speech appears to fly in the face of a comment by the Prime Minister, John Howard, last year that the "contest in Iraq represents a critical confrontation in the war against terror ..."

The brigadier said populations were being cut off from their traditional roots, giving them "aspirations that cannot be immediately met", and fuelling a search for identity.

Terrorists were exploiting local issues - such as ethnic wars - to pursue global ends. From a military point of view, the job was now one of counter-insurgency, he said.

As a result, Australia's future soldiers would fight increasingly close to populations, with the enemy "continuing to retreat into complex terrain".

While success in battle was critical, it would not of itself deliver victory - that would come by winning over the hearts and minds of the local people.

The war of the future would be "out of human control". There was "no alternative" but to engage the population and "convince them of your rightness".

"Our proximity to populations enables us to influence and control the populations, [it] enables us to dominate the environment, generate intelligence and eventually bring the conflict to a resolution," the brigadier told the conference last week.

To fight such a war, a new kind of soldier was needed - one not only proficient in the latest technologies, but who had been educated in "cultural understanding" and sensitivity.

Brigadier Kelly said modern war could be defined as "conflict, using violent and non-violent means, between multiple actors and influences, competing for control over the perceptions, behaviour and allegiances of human population groups".

He said he found it interesting that "if you take out violence out of the first line, it's a description of politics".

Copyright © The Sydney Morning Herald, 27-04-2005.

[Barst]

Ex-UN envoy: U.S. feared discovery of prison abuse

By Deborah Horan
Tribune staff reporter

Cherif Bassiouni, the DePaul University law professor who last week lost his post as UN human-rights investigator in Afghanistan, said Thursday he believed the U.S. pushed him out to hide abuses in American-run prisons in the country and the possible transfer there of as many as 200 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"They have two groups of people they want to hide--the people in Afghan prisons and the people they transfer from Guantanamo," Bassiouni said in an interview. "The bigger exposure is the transfer of about 200 people from Guantanamo."

Bassiouni said he had heard reports the U.S. plans to transfer prisoners to Afghanistan from Guantanamo before opening the prison in Cuba to international inspectors.

He called the move part of a "well-known game" that governments around the world use to ease prison conditions and hide torture victims before allowing human-rights inspectors into facilities.

"The U.S. can say, `Oh, we released them,'" Bassiouni said. "Where? They'll probably fudge on the answers."

Bassiouni, who took up his post in April 2004, was informed last Friday via e-mail that his two-year mandate would not be renewed. The e-mail came the same day that he submitted a 24-page report that criticized the United States and other countries for not allowing him and other inspectors into coalition forces' facilities. (...)


Chicago Tribune, 29-04-2005

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New Evidence : Terror Alerts Were Used As Electoral Weapons

by Chris Bowers

05/11/05 - Remember the chart that showed the relationship between Bush's approval rating and terror alters? (http://img57.exs.cx/img57/7638/aprov...lert_chart.gif) The chart clearly suggested that terror alerts were used more frequently during times of unpopularity for Bush. Now, new evidence, from Tom Ridge himself, suggests that there was indeed massive outside pressure on the department on homeland to security to often raise the terror alert despite flimsy evidence:

The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.
Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of the nation's homeland security apparatus.

Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "

Combined with what Ridge has said, and the chart linked above, can there be any doubt that the Bush administration was frequently raising the terror alerts to help his election chances and increase his political capital rather than to signal actual threats? As Parker says, Howard Dean was right. Terror alerts have undoubtedly been used as a electoral weapon rather than as a safety measure.


Zie Parker's Diary, 11-05-2005; For more on this subject, JuliusBlog.

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`America kept in dark' - U.S. TV accused of ignoring situation - Iraq on brink of civil war, analysts say


05/14/05 "Toronto Star" - - WASHINGTON—When the man in the white van slowed, the group of labourers from Kut, southeast of Baghdad, approached him in the hope they would be offered work. Instead he offered death.


As the workers approached, the man blew up his van, killing himself and the men who had tentatively moved to him in trust, sending body parts hurtling through the sky and, according to witnesses, turning the nearest hospital into a blood-stained shrine of futility, overwhelmed by the number and severity of the casualties.

The scene was played out many times over in Iraq this week, where a spike in insurgent violence has placed the country on the precipice of civil war.

More than 450 Iraqis have been slaughtered in the past two weeks in a direct challenge to a new Iraqi government, making those heady days of the January election seem like something from the distant past. The euphoria of the purple thumb, the symbol of the bravery of voters, has given way to a river of blood-red in some of the worst violence in the post-Saddam era.

"We are on the edge of civil war," said Noah Feldman, a New York University professor and chief U.S. adviser to Iraq on the writing of the country's new constitution.

Yet, somehow this sharp surge in deadly bombings, assassinations and kidnappings in Iraq has occurred largely under the radar in the United States.

No public figures have risen this week to decry this most recent carnage, no one is breaking into regular programming on cable news shows.

Perhaps Americans have simply become numb to the background hum of Iraqi violence. Perhaps the lack of graphic images on television mean that medium doesn't know how to cover the story. Perhaps, more cynically, Iraqis killing Iraqis is not as compelling a story.

The left-leaning American Progress Action Fund said in a statement yesterday America's most important foreign policy venture is teetering on the edge of civil war, but it is being ignored by television networks.

"Television media — still the primary source of news for most Americans — is failing miserably," it said. "America is being kept in the dark."

While American TV viewers turn to runaway brides, fast-food fingers and the daily Michael Jackson aberration, they are missing the story of an increasingly massive foreign policy failure.

The number of car bomb attacks in Iraq jumped from 64 in February to 135 in April, a record, according to U.S. military statistics. Insurgents are reported to have stockpiled car bombs and the attacks are becoming more brazen as Sunni insurgents and foreign fighters try to provoke civil war with the Shiite majority.

"There is an apparent free flow of suicide bombers into Iraq," a Western diplomat told the London-based Guardian newspaper.

The U.S. death toll is at 1,611 and U.S. legislators this week approved funding which pushes the cost of the Iraq war beyond $250 billion (U.S.)

The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, called again this week for patience.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`The only thing that can stop civil war is to bring this insurgency under control.'

Noah Feldman, U.S. adviser to Iraq

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"One thing we know about insurgencies is that they last from, you know, three, four years to nine years," he said. "These are tough fights. And in the end, it's going to have to be the Iraqis that win this.

"If there was a magic bullet, then Gen. (George) Casey and Gen. (John) Abizaid or I, or somebody on the staff more likely, would have found it."

While U.S. authorities say they believe most of the jihadists are foreign fighters — and have launched a major offensive near the Syria border to try to choke off the influx — J. Patrick Lang, a former chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defence Intelligence Agency, told National Public Radio this week that he believed the insurgents are 90 per cent home-grown.

He said they're a mix of former military, intelligence, police personnel and Baath party functionaries taking directions from a government-in-exile.

David Phillips of the non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations and author of Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco, said the spike in the insurgency can be blamed on three factors.

He said the delay of Iraqis in convening a new government to validate the January elections, the preponderance of Shiites and Kurds in the government plus the intensification of the de-Baathification process simply backed the Sunni view that there is no role for them in the new government.

But, Phillips also points to statements from the White House that U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had intervened to try to break the cabinet stalemate as another spark.

"It reinforced the view in Iraq that (Prime Minister Ibrahim) Jaafari was merely a proxy for those people in Washington," he said.

The damage done by a decision to give Sunnis a small representation in the cabinet unveiled last month seems to have been exacerbated with the decision to appoint only two Sunnis to the 55-member committee chosen to write Iraq's permanent constitution.

It will only play to the sense of despair and disenfranchisement among Sunnis, many analysts say.

Feldman said the Shiite population in Iraq has shown patience of historic proportion in not retaliating against the Sunni attacks.

"The reason I say we are on the edge of civil war is that you can't have one if only one side is attacking," he said. "But the truth is, Shiites are only human and they will run out of patience," he said. "The only thing that can stop civil war is to bring this insurgency under control."

But to do so, he said, Iraqi security forces have to convince Sunnis that violence will not work and they should join the political process.

Sunni fighters, however, are convinced they can hasten the departure of some 139,000 American troops by starting a civil war, Feldman wrote.

Conversely, he said, should U.S. troops depart, civil war is guaranteed.

Phillips is even more pessimistic. When asked about the chances that the brakes could be put on the insurgency in the short term, he answered: "None. This insurgency will go on for years and years, regardless of what the U.S. does."

The insurgency can never be defeated by military force, he said. Instead, Iraqis have to believe that their institutions are worth defending and that defence has to come from Iraqi troops.


Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, 14-05-2005