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By Bernd Debusmann
At the Beijing Olympics, China trounced the United States in the contest for gold medals. In the Caucasus, Russia inflicted a humiliating military defeat on Georgia, America's closest ally in the region. At home, the US economy is in deep trouble. The misery index, a combination of the rates of inflation and unemployment, stands at its highest in 16 years (11.3 percent in July) and there are forecasts of worse to come.
The Olympics marked China's status as a world power and the first time since 1996 that Americans did not win most gold medals. In the Caucasus, Russia showed that it can do as it sees fit in its own backyard, no matter how loudly Washington protests. That includes recognising as independent states the two breakaway provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, that Georgia claims as its own.
In the Great Power game in the region, the score so far is Russia 1, US nil. Does all this mean that the oft-predicted end of America's role as the world's only superpower is near? Depends on the definition of "near". Political power grows from the barrel of a gun, as China's Mao Tse Tung observed, and the United States spends more on its armed forces than the rest of the world combined. There are more than 700 US military bases in some 130 countries.
And despite its current troubles, the US economy is larger than those of the next three countries put together. Still, the US is no longer number one in all the fields where its dominance was once taken for granted. The world's leading financial center, for example, is no longer New York, it is London. The world's largest investment fund is in Abu Dhabi. The world's tallest building will soon be in Dubai.
Predictions of shrinking (or rising) American power have been wrong in the past. In his book "the Rise and Fall of Great Powers," the Harvard historian Paul Kennedy foresaw the imminent decline of the United States. The book was published just before the Soviet Union collapsed, a turn of history that left the US as the world's only superpower. On the opposite end of wrong forecasts was Francis Fukuyama's famous essay "The End of History," written after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It argued that m
ankind's "ideological evolution" had ended, to be replaced by "the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Things didn't quite turn out that way.
In an essay for the Washington Post this month, Fukuyama, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, conceded that "today, US dominance of the world system is slipping; Russia and China offer themselves as models, showing off a combination of authoritarianism and modernization that offers a clear challenge to liberal democracy. They seem to have plenty of imitators.
Both Russia and China are members of the world's biggest emerging market economies, the so-called BRIC club - Brazil, Russia, India and China. They account for 40 percent of the world's population, sit on vast foreign exchange reserves, and have geopolitical ambitions. BRIC foreign ministers had their first formal meeting in May, in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg.
Given the perils of crystal-gazing into the future shape of the world, it is not easy to find an expert willing to hazard a guess on how long American supremacy will last. But there is at least one, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University who two years ago correctly forecast the bursting of the US housing bubble and the dismal chain of events that followed. At the time, many of his fellow economists snickered.
Roubini thinks that it will take a couple of decades for "US policy mistakes in economic, financial and foreign policies (to) ... erode the power of the American empire." That would make it relatively short-lived. Depending on how you count, the Roman empire lasted more than 500 years, the British 460 or so, the Spanish around 400. One of America's most serious problems, Roubini writes on his website, is the fact that the US is the world's biggest net borrower and net debtor. The countries financing the Am
erican deficits are its rivals, China and Russia, and Middle Eastern oil exporters.
History, he says, provides lessons on the importance of financial prudence. "Empires ... tend to be net lenders, i.e. run current account surpluses. The decline of the British Empire started in World War II when the British fiscal deficits in the war and the current account deficits turned the empire into a net borrower and a net debtor." The British twin deficits were being financed by a rising power that was a net lender and a net creditor - the United States. Whether it will ever return to that state depends, in part, on the competence, or lack of it, of the next US administration. President George W Bush's team did not set a good example.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
OSC: Russia- Iran Alliance?
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By Juan Cole
The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Russian press proposing a strategic alliance between Russia and Iran.
Pundit on Possible Russia-Iran Alliance To Counter ’Unfriendly’ US Moves
Article by Radzhab Safarov, General Director of the Russian Center for Iranian Studies: "Iranian Trump Card. Russia Can Take Control of Persian Gulf"
Vremya Novostey
Friday, August 29, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text
The recognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence by Russia is a timely step to protect these republics from new Georgian aggression. However, taking into account the United States’ plans to expedite Georgia’s and Ukraine’s accession to the NATO military-political bloc, the situation near the Russian border remains alarming. At the same time Moscow has a lot of possibilities to take balanced counter measures to the United States’ and entire NATO’s unfriendly plans. In particular, Russia can rely on those countries that effectively oppose the United States’ and their satellites’ expansion. Only collective efforts can help to create a situation which would, if not eliminate then at least reduce the risk of the Cold War’s transformation into local and global conflicts.
For instance, Moscow could strengthen its military-technical ties with Syria and launch negotiations on the reestablishment of its military presence in Cuba. However, the most serious step which the United States and especially Israel fear (incidentally, Israel supplied arms to Georgia) is hypothetical revision of Russia’s foreign policy with regard to Iran. A strategic alliance presuming the signing of a new large-scale military political treaty with Iran could change the entire geopolitical picture of the contemporary world.
New allied relations may result in the deployment of at least two military bases in strategic regions of Iran. One military base could be deployed in the north of the country in the Iranian province of Eastern Azerbaijan and the other one in the south, on the Island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf. Due to the base in Iran’s Eastern Azerbaijan Russia would be able to monitor military activities in the Republic of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey and share this information with Iran.
The deployment of a military base on the Island of Qeshm would allow Russia to monitor the United States’ and NATO’s activities in the Persian Gulf zone, Iraq and other Arab states. With the help of special equipment Russia could effectively monitor whois sailing toward this sea bottleneck, from where, and with what cargo on board to enter the World Ocean or to return.
For the first time ever Russia will have a possibility to stop suspicious vessels and ships and inspect their cargo, which the Americans have been cynically doing in that zone for many decades. In exchange for the deployment of its military bases Russia could help the Iranians to deploy modern air defense and missile defense systems along the perimeter of its borders. Tehran, for instance, needs Russia’s modern S-400 SAMs.
The Iranian leadership paid close attention to reports stating that the Georgian Government’s secret resolution gave the United States and Israel a carte blanche to use Georgian territory and local military bases for delivering missile and bomb strikes against Iranian facilities in the event of need. Another neighbor, Turkey, is not only a NATO member, but also a powerful regional opponent and economic rival of Iran. In addition to this, the Republic of Azerbaijan has become the West’s key partner on the issue of transportation of Caspian energy resources to world markets. The Iranians are also concerned at Baku’s plans to give Western (above all American) capital access to the so-called Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea, which is fraught with new conflicts, because the legal status of the Caspian Sea has not been defined to date.
Russia and Iran can also accelerate the process of setting up a cartel of leading gas producers, which journalists have already dubbed the "gas OPEC." Russia and Iran occupy first and second place in the world respectively in terms of natural gas reserves. They jointly possess more than 60 percent of the world’s gas deposits. Therefore, even small coordination in the elaboration of a single pricing policy may force one-half of the world, at least virtually entire Europe, to moderate its ambitions and treat gas exporters in a friendlier manner.
While moving toward allied relations, Russia can develop cooperation with Iran in virtually all areas, including nuclear power engineering. Russia can earn tens of billions of dollars on the construction of nuclear power plants in Iran alone. Tehran can receive not only economic, but also political support from Russia in the development of its own atomic energy sector.
In addition to this,in view of the imminent breakup of the CIS from which Georgia already pulled out, Russia could accelerate the process of accepting Iran as an equal member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). By accepting Iran, one of the key countries of the Islamic world, the organization could change fundamentally both in terms of its potential and in terms of its regional role. Meanwhile, as an SCO member Iran will find itself under the collective umbrella of this organization, including under the protection of such nuclear states as Russia and China. This will lay foundations for a powerful Russia-Iran-China axis,which the United States and its allies fear so much.
(Description of Source: Moscow Vremya Novostey in Russian -- Liberal, small-circulation paper that sometimes criticizes the government)
By Juan Cole
The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Russian press proposing a strategic alliance between Russia and Iran.
Pundit on Possible Russia-Iran Alliance To Counter ’Unfriendly’ US Moves
Article by Radzhab Safarov, General Director of the Russian Center for Iranian Studies: "Iranian Trump Card. Russia Can Take Control of Persian Gulf"
Vremya Novostey
Friday, August 29, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text
The recognition of South Ossetia’s and Abkhazia’s independence by Russia is a timely step to protect these republics from new Georgian aggression. However, taking into account the United States’ plans to expedite Georgia’s and Ukraine’s accession to the NATO military-political bloc, the situation near the Russian border remains alarming. At the same time Moscow has a lot of possibilities to take balanced counter measures to the United States’ and entire NATO’s unfriendly plans. In particular, Russia can rely on those countries that effectively oppose the United States’ and their satellites’ expansion. Only collective efforts can help to create a situation which would, if not eliminate then at least reduce the risk of the Cold War’s transformation into local and global conflicts.
For instance, Moscow could strengthen its military-technical ties with Syria and launch negotiations on the reestablishment of its military presence in Cuba. However, the most serious step which the United States and especially Israel fear (incidentally, Israel supplied arms to Georgia) is hypothetical revision of Russia’s foreign policy with regard to Iran. A strategic alliance presuming the signing of a new large-scale military political treaty with Iran could change the entire geopolitical picture of the contemporary world.
New allied relations may result in the deployment of at least two military bases in strategic regions of Iran. One military base could be deployed in the north of the country in the Iranian province of Eastern Azerbaijan and the other one in the south, on the Island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf. Due to the base in Iran’s Eastern Azerbaijan Russia would be able to monitor military activities in the Republic of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey and share this information with Iran.
The deployment of a military base on the Island of Qeshm would allow Russia to monitor the United States’ and NATO’s activities in the Persian Gulf zone, Iraq and other Arab states. With the help of special equipment Russia could effectively monitor whois sailing toward this sea bottleneck, from where, and with what cargo on board to enter the World Ocean or to return.
For the first time ever Russia will have a possibility to stop suspicious vessels and ships and inspect their cargo, which the Americans have been cynically doing in that zone for many decades. In exchange for the deployment of its military bases Russia could help the Iranians to deploy modern air defense and missile defense systems along the perimeter of its borders. Tehran, for instance, needs Russia’s modern S-400 SAMs.
The Iranian leadership paid close attention to reports stating that the Georgian Government’s secret resolution gave the United States and Israel a carte blanche to use Georgian territory and local military bases for delivering missile and bomb strikes against Iranian facilities in the event of need. Another neighbor, Turkey, is not only a NATO member, but also a powerful regional opponent and economic rival of Iran. In addition to this, the Republic of Azerbaijan has become the West’s key partner on the issue of transportation of Caspian energy resources to world markets. The Iranians are also concerned at Baku’s plans to give Western (above all American) capital access to the so-called Azerbaijani sector of the Caspian Sea, which is fraught with new conflicts, because the legal status of the Caspian Sea has not been defined to date.
Russia and Iran can also accelerate the process of setting up a cartel of leading gas producers, which journalists have already dubbed the "gas OPEC." Russia and Iran occupy first and second place in the world respectively in terms of natural gas reserves. They jointly possess more than 60 percent of the world’s gas deposits. Therefore, even small coordination in the elaboration of a single pricing policy may force one-half of the world, at least virtually entire Europe, to moderate its ambitions and treat gas exporters in a friendlier manner.
While moving toward allied relations, Russia can develop cooperation with Iran in virtually all areas, including nuclear power engineering. Russia can earn tens of billions of dollars on the construction of nuclear power plants in Iran alone. Tehran can receive not only economic, but also political support from Russia in the development of its own atomic energy sector.
In addition to this,in view of the imminent breakup of the CIS from which Georgia already pulled out, Russia could accelerate the process of accepting Iran as an equal member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). By accepting Iran, one of the key countries of the Islamic world, the organization could change fundamentally both in terms of its potential and in terms of its regional role. Meanwhile, as an SCO member Iran will find itself under the collective umbrella of this organization, including under the protection of such nuclear states as Russia and China. This will lay foundations for a powerful Russia-Iran-China axis,which the United States and its allies fear so much.
(Description of Source: Moscow Vremya Novostey in Russian -- Liberal, small-circulation paper that sometimes criticizes the government)
Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent
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By John Byrne
By declaring indefinite state of war
As the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain’s choice of running mate, President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presidential power by ensuring that America remains in a state of permanent war.
Buried in a recent proposal by the Administration is a sentence that has received scant attention -- and was buried itself in the very newspaper that exposed it Saturday. It is an affirmation that the United States remains at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and "associated organizations."
Part of a proposal for Guantanamo Bay legal detainees, the provision before Congress seeks to “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”
The New York Times’ page 8 placement of the article in its Saturday edition seems to downplay its importance. Such a re-affirmation of war carries broad legal implications that could imperil Americans’ civil liberties and the rights of foreign nationals for decades to come.
It was under the guise of war that President Bush claimed a legal mandate for his warrantless wiretapping program, giving the National Security Agency power to intercept calls Americans made abroad. More of this program has emerged in recent years, and it includes the surveillance of Americans’ information and exchanges online.
"War powers" have also given President Bush cover to hold Americans without habeas corpus -- detainment without explanation or charge. Jose Padilla, a Chicago resident arrested in 2002, was held without trial for five years before being convicted of conspiring to kill individuals abroad and provide support for terrorism.
But his arrest was made with proclamations that Padilla had plans to build a "dirty bomb." He was never convicted of this charge. Padilla’s legal team also claimed that during his time in military custody -- the four years he was held without charge -- he was tortured with sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced stress positions and injected with drugs.
Times reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that the measure is the latest step that the Administration has taken to "make permanent" key aspects of its "long war" against terrorism. Congress recently passed a much-maligned bill giving telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for their participation in what constitutional experts see as an illegal or borderline-illegal surveillance program, and is considering efforts to give the FBI more power in their investigative techniques.
"It is uncertain whether Congress will take the administration up on its request," Lichtblau writes. "Some Republicans have already embraced the idea, with Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introducing a measure almost identical to the administration’s proposal. ’Since 9/11,’ Mr. Smith said, ’we have been at war with an unconventional enemy whose primary goal is to kill innocent Americans.’"
If enough Republicans come aboard, Democrats may struggle to defeat the provision. Despite holding majorities in the House and Senate, they have failed to beat back some of President Bush’s purported "security" measures, such as the telecom immunity bill.
Bush’s open-ended permanent war language worries his critics. They say it could provide indefinite, if hazy, legal justification for any number of activities -- including detention of terrorists suspects at bases like Guantanamo Bay (where for years the Administration would not even release the names of those being held), and the NSA’s warantless wiretapping program.
Lichtblau co-wrote the Times article revealing the Administration’s eavesdropping program along with fellow reporter James Risen.
He notes that Bush’s language "recalls a resolution, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001... [which] authorized the president to ’use all necessary and appropriate force’ against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent future strikes. That authorization, still in effect, was initially viewed by many members of Congress who voted for it as the go-ahead for the administration to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to Mr. bin Laden."
"But the military authorization became the secret legal basis for some of the administration’s most controversial legal tactics, including the wiretapping program, and that still gnaws at some members of Congress," he adds.
By John Byrne
By declaring indefinite state of war
As the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain’s choice of running mate, President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presidential power by ensuring that America remains in a state of permanent war.
Buried in a recent proposal by the Administration is a sentence that has received scant attention -- and was buried itself in the very newspaper that exposed it Saturday. It is an affirmation that the United States remains at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and "associated organizations."
Part of a proposal for Guantanamo Bay legal detainees, the provision before Congress seeks to “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”
The New York Times’ page 8 placement of the article in its Saturday edition seems to downplay its importance. Such a re-affirmation of war carries broad legal implications that could imperil Americans’ civil liberties and the rights of foreign nationals for decades to come.
It was under the guise of war that President Bush claimed a legal mandate for his warrantless wiretapping program, giving the National Security Agency power to intercept calls Americans made abroad. More of this program has emerged in recent years, and it includes the surveillance of Americans’ information and exchanges online.
"War powers" have also given President Bush cover to hold Americans without habeas corpus -- detainment without explanation or charge. Jose Padilla, a Chicago resident arrested in 2002, was held without trial for five years before being convicted of conspiring to kill individuals abroad and provide support for terrorism.
But his arrest was made with proclamations that Padilla had plans to build a "dirty bomb." He was never convicted of this charge. Padilla’s legal team also claimed that during his time in military custody -- the four years he was held without charge -- he was tortured with sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced stress positions and injected with drugs.
Times reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that the measure is the latest step that the Administration has taken to "make permanent" key aspects of its "long war" against terrorism. Congress recently passed a much-maligned bill giving telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for their participation in what constitutional experts see as an illegal or borderline-illegal surveillance program, and is considering efforts to give the FBI more power in their investigative techniques.
"It is uncertain whether Congress will take the administration up on its request," Lichtblau writes. "Some Republicans have already embraced the idea, with Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introducing a measure almost identical to the administration’s proposal. ’Since 9/11,’ Mr. Smith said, ’we have been at war with an unconventional enemy whose primary goal is to kill innocent Americans.’"
If enough Republicans come aboard, Democrats may struggle to defeat the provision. Despite holding majorities in the House and Senate, they have failed to beat back some of President Bush’s purported "security" measures, such as the telecom immunity bill.
Bush’s open-ended permanent war language worries his critics. They say it could provide indefinite, if hazy, legal justification for any number of activities -- including detention of terrorists suspects at bases like Guantanamo Bay (where for years the Administration would not even release the names of those being held), and the NSA’s warantless wiretapping program.
Lichtblau co-wrote the Times article revealing the Administration’s eavesdropping program along with fellow reporter James Risen.
He notes that Bush’s language "recalls a resolution, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001... [which] authorized the president to ’use all necessary and appropriate force’ against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent future strikes. That authorization, still in effect, was initially viewed by many members of Congress who voted for it as the go-ahead for the administration to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to Mr. bin Laden."
"But the military authorization became the secret legal basis for some of the administration’s most controversial legal tactics, including the wiretapping program, and that still gnaws at some members of Congress," he adds.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Exclusive: Chief Fired by Palin Speaks Out
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The July firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan by Gov. Sarah Palin, who was announced as John McCain's running mate on Friday, has unearthed a stream of soap-opera-like details about Palin, her husband, her family and top state appointees. The controversy has also cut against Palin's reputation for holding an ethical line and standing up to colleagues in the Republican Party over matters of principle.
Monegan, 57, a respected former chief of the Anchorage Police Department, said in an interview with The Washington Post's James V. Grimaldi on Friday that the governor repeatedly brought up the topic of her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, after Monegan became the state's commissioner of public safety in December 2006. Palin's husband, Todd, met with Monegan and presented a dossier of information about Wooten, who was going through a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister, Molly. Monegan also said Sarah Palin sent him e-mails on the subject, but Monegan declined to disclose them, saying he planned to give them to a legislative investigator looking into the matter.
Palin initially denied that she or anyone in her administration had ever pressured Monegan to fire the trooper, but this summer acknowledged more than a half a dozen contacts over the matter, including one phone call from a Palin administration official to a state police lieutenant. The call was recorded and was released by Palin's office this month. Todd Palin told a television reporter in Alaska that he did meet with Monegan, but said he was just "informing" Monegan about the issue, not exerting pressure.
"She never directly asked me to fire him," Monegan said.
But he said Todd Palin told him Wooten "shouldn't be a trooper. I've tried to explain to him, you can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference.
"I think he's emotionally committed in trying to see that his former brother-in-law is punished."
The allegation against Palin, "undercuts one of the points they are making that she is an ethical reformer," said Democratic state Sen. Hollis French, who is managing a $100,000 investigation into the firing of Walter Monegan.
The July firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan by Gov. Sarah Palin, who was announced as John McCain's running mate on Friday, has unearthed a stream of soap-opera-like details about Palin, her husband, her family and top state appointees. The controversy has also cut against Palin's reputation for holding an ethical line and standing up to colleagues in the Republican Party over matters of principle.
Monegan, 57, a respected former chief of the Anchorage Police Department, said in an interview with The Washington Post's James V. Grimaldi on Friday that the governor repeatedly brought up the topic of her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, after Monegan became the state's commissioner of public safety in December 2006. Palin's husband, Todd, met with Monegan and presented a dossier of information about Wooten, who was going through a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister, Molly. Monegan also said Sarah Palin sent him e-mails on the subject, but Monegan declined to disclose them, saying he planned to give them to a legislative investigator looking into the matter.
Palin initially denied that she or anyone in her administration had ever pressured Monegan to fire the trooper, but this summer acknowledged more than a half a dozen contacts over the matter, including one phone call from a Palin administration official to a state police lieutenant. The call was recorded and was released by Palin's office this month. Todd Palin told a television reporter in Alaska that he did meet with Monegan, but said he was just "informing" Monegan about the issue, not exerting pressure.
"She never directly asked me to fire him," Monegan said.
But he said Todd Palin told him Wooten "shouldn't be a trooper. I've tried to explain to him, you can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference.
"I think he's emotionally committed in trying to see that his former brother-in-law is punished."
The allegation against Palin, "undercuts one of the points they are making that she is an ethical reformer," said Democratic state Sen. Hollis French, who is managing a $100,000 investigation into the firing of Walter Monegan.
The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack
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In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s "contra" army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles.1 Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The Mercury News’ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of "hits" a day.
In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s "contra" army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles.1 Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The Mercury News’ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of "hits" a day.
While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine. The CIA’s drug network, wrote Webb, "opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ’crack’ capital of the world." Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.
CIA Director John Deutch declared that he found "no connection whatsoever" between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. And major media--the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post--have run long pieces refuting the Mercury News series. They deny that Bay Area-based Nicaraguan drug dealers, Juan Norwin Meneses and Oscar Danilo Blandon, worked for the CIA or contributed "millions in drug profits" to the contras, as Webb contended. They also note that neither Ross nor the gangs were the first or sole distributors of crack in L.A. Webb, however, did not claim this. He wrote that the huge influx of cocaine happened to come at just the time that street-level drug dealers were figuring out how to make cocaine affordable by changing it into crack.
Many in the media have also postulated that any drug-trafficking contras involved were "rogue" elements, not supported by the CIA. But these denials overlook much of the Mercury News’ evidence of CIA complicity. For example:
CIA-supplied contra planes and pilots carried cocaine from Central America to U.S. airports and military bases. In 1985, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Celerino Castillo reported to his superiors that cocaine was being stored at the CIA’s contra-supply warehouse at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador for shipment to the U.S.2 The DEA did nothing, and Castillo was gradually forced out of the agency.
When Danilo Blandón was finally arrested in 1986, he admitted to drug crimes that would have sent others away for life. The Justice Department, however, freed Blandón after only 28 months behind bars and then hired him as a full-time DEA informant, paying him more than $166,000. When Blandón testified in a 1996 trial against Ricky Ross, the Justice Department blocked any inquiry about Blandón’s connection to the CIA.
Although Norwin Meneses is listed in DEA computers as a major international drug smuggler implicated in 45 separate federal investigations since 1974, he lived conspicuously in California until 1989 and was never arrested in the U.S.
Senate investigators and agents from four organizations all complained that their contra-drug investigations "were hampered," Webb wrote, "by the CIA or unnamed ’national security’ interests." In the 1984 "Frogman Case," for instance, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco returned $36,800 seized from a Nicaraguan drug dealer after two contra leaders sent letters to the court arguing that the cash was intended for the contras. Federal prosecutors ordered the letter and other case evidence sealed for "national security" reasons. When Senate investigators later asked the Justice Department to explain this unusual turn of events, they ran into a wall of secrecy.
History of CIA Involvement in Drug Trafficking
"In my 30year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA." -- Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit.3
The foregoing discussion should not be regarded as any kind of historical aberration inasmuch as the CIA has had a long and virtually continuous involvement with drug trafficking since the end of World War II.
1947 to 1951, France
CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrest control of labor unions from the Communist Party. The Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks--ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, which turned Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. Marseille’s first heroin laboratories were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.4
Early 1950s, Southeast Asia
The Nationalist Chinese army, organized by the CIA to wage war against Communist China, became the opium baron of The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand, and Laos), the world’s largest source of opium and heroin. Air America, the CIA’s principal proprietary airline, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia.5
1950s to early 1970s, Indochina
During U.S. military involvement in Laos and other parts of Indochina, Air America flew opium and heroin throughout the area. Many GI’s in Vietnam became addicts. A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming heroin market.6
1973 to 1980, Australia
The Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney was a CIA bank in all but name. Among its officers were a network of U.S. generals, admirals, and CIA men--including former CIA Director William Colby, who was also one of its lawyers. With branches in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America, and the U.S., Nugan Hand Bank financed drug trafficking, money laundering, and international arms dealing. In 1980, amidst several mysterious deaths, the bank collapsed, $50 million in debt.7
1970s and 1980s, Panama
For more than a decade, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a highly paid CIA asset and collaborator, despite knowledge by U.S. drug authorities as early as 1971 that the general was heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega facilitated "guns-for-drugs" flights for the contras, providing protection and pilots, safe havens for drug cartel officials, and discreet banking facilities. U.S. officials, including then-CIA Director William Webster and several DEA officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against competitors of his Medellín cartel patrons). The U.S. government only turned against Noriega, invading Panama in December 1989 and kidnapping the general, once they discovered he was providing intelligence and services to the Cubans and Sandinistas. Ironically, drug trafficking through Panama increased after the U.S. invasion.8
1980s, Central America
The San Jose Mercury News series documents just one thread of the interwoven operations linking the CIA, the contras, and the cocaine cartels. Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated drug trafficking as long as the traffickers gave support to the contras. In 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations (the Kerry committee) concluded a three-year investigation by stating: "There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual contras, contra suppliers, contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the contras, and contra supporters throughout the region. . . . U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua. . . . In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter. . . . Senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the contras’ funding problems."9
In Costa Rica, which served as the "Southern Front" for the contras (Honduras being the Northern Front), there were several CIA-contra networks involved in drug trafficking. In addition to those servicing the Meneses-Blandon operation (detailed by the Mercury News) and Noriega’s operation, there was CIA operative John Hull, whose farms along Costa Rica’s border with Nicaragua were the main staging area for the contras. Hull and other CIA-connected contra supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian drug trafficker who later admitted to giving $3 million in cash and several planes to contra leaders.10 In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DEA-hired plane clandestinely and illegally flew the CIA operative to Miami, via Haiti. The U.S. repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull to Costa Rica to stand trial.11
Another Costa Rican-based drug ring involved a group of Cuban Americans whom the CIA had hired as military trainers for the contras. Many had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking. They used contra planes and a Costa Rican-based shrimp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to channel cocaine to the U.S.12
Costa Rica was not the only route. Guatemala, whose military intelligence service--closely associated with the CIA--harbored many drug traffickers, according to the DEA, was another way station along the cocaine highway.13 Additionally, the Medellín cartel’s Miami accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, testified that he funneled nearly $10 million to Nicaraguan contras through long-time CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was based at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador.14
The contras provided both protection and infrastructure (planes, pilots, airstrips, warehouses, front companies, and banks) to these CIA-linked drug networks. At least four transport companies under investigation for drug trafficking received U.S. government contracts to carry nonlethal supplies to the contras.15 Southern Air Transport, "formerly" CIA-owned and later under Pentagon contract, was involved in the drug running as well.16 Cocaine-laden planes flew to Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and other locations, including several military bases. Designated as "Contra Craft," these shipments were not to be inspected. When some authority wasn’t apprised and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled to result in dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation.17
Mid-1980s to early 1990s, Haiti
While working to keep key Haitian military and political leaders in power, the CIA turned a blind eye to their clients’ drug trafficking. In 1986, the Agency added some more names to its payroll by creating a new Haitian organization, the National Intelligence Service (SIN). SIN’s mandate included countering the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in trafficking, a trade aided and abetted by some Haitian military and political leaders.18
1980s to early 1990s, Afghanistan
CIA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting the Soviet-supported government, which had plans to reform Afghan society. The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading drug lords and the biggest heroin refiner, who was also the largest recipient of CIA military support. CIA-supplied trucks and mules that had carried arms into Afghanistan were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The output provided up to one-half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies.19 In 1993, an official of the DEA dubbed Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.20
Endnotes
1 Gary Webb, "Dark Alliance" series, San Jose Mercury News. Beginning August 18, 1996.
2 Celerino Castillo, Powder Burns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Mosaic Press, 1994). Los Angeles Times lengthy series of articles, October 20, 21, 22, 1996. Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus, "The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot" (Washington Post, October 4, 1996). Howard Kurtz, "Running with the CIA Story" (Washington Post, October 2, 1996). Douglas Farah and Walter Pincus "CIA, Contras and Drugs: Questions on Links Linger" (Washington Post, October 31, 1996). Tim Golden,"Though Evidence is Thin, Tale of CIA and Drugs Has a Life of Its Own" (New York Times, October 21, 1996).
3 Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) pp. x-xi.
4 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York City, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, chapter 2).
5 Christopher Robbins, Air America (New York City, New York: Avon Books, 1985) chapter 9. McCoy, Politics of Heroin.
6 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, chapter 9.
7 Robbins, Air America, p. 128 and chapter 9. Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA (New York City, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987). William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995) p. 420, note 33.
8 Scott & Marshall, Cocaine Politics; John Dinges, Our Man in Panama (NY, New York: Random House, 1991); Murray Waas, "Cocaine and the White House Connection", Los Angeles Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6 and Oct. 7-13, 1988; National Security Archive Documentation Packet: The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations (Washington, DC).
9 "Kerry Report": Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, a Report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, 1989, pp. 2, 36, 41.
10 Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1994).
11 Martha Honey and David Myers, "U.S. Probing Drug Agent’s Activities in Costa Rica," San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1991.
12 Honey, Hostile Acts.
13 Frank Smyth, "In Guatemala, The DEA Fights the CIA", New Republic, June 5, 1995; Blum, Killing Hope, p. 239.
14 Martha Honey, "Drug Figure Says Cartel Gave Drugs to Contras" Washington Post, June 30, 1987.
15 Kerry report, Drugs.
16 Scott & Marshall, Cocaine Politics, pp. 17-18.
17 Scott & Marshall, Cocaine Politics; Waas, "Cocaine and the White House"; NSA, The Contras.
18 New York Times, Nov. 14, 1993; The Nation, Oct. 3, 1994, p. 346.
19 Blum, Killing Hope, p. 351; Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (New York City, New York: Warner Books, 1990) pp. 151-2.
20 Los Angeles Times, Aug. 22, 1993
Sources for more information
World Wide Web
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Covert Action Quarterly
http://www.worldmedia.com/caq/
The National Security Archive
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/
Organizations
The National Security Archive
Gelman Library, Ste. 7012130 H Street NW
Washington, DC 20037
Voice: (202) 994-7000
Email: nsarchiv@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Contact: Peter Kornbluh
Congresswoman Maxine Waters
330 Cannon House Building
Washington, DC 20515
Voice: (202) 225-2201
Contact: Joseph Lee
Covert Action Quarterly
1500 Mass Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20005
Voice: (202) 331-9763
Fax: (202) 331-9751
Email: caq@igc.apc.org
Contact: Terry Allen
Latin American Working Group
110 Maryland Ave. NE Box 15
Washington, DC 20002
Voice: (202) 546-7010
Fax: (202) 543-7647
Contact: Lisa Hargaard
Publications
Lorraine Adams, "North Didn’t Relay Drug Tips", The Washington Post, Oct. 22, 1994, p. 1.
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995).
Celerino Castillo with David Harmon, Powder Burns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Mosaic Press, 1994).
John Dinges, Our Man in Panama (New York City, NY: Random House, 1991).
Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1994).
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, December 1988.
Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA (New York City, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987).
Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972).
Clarence Lusane, Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
National Security Archive, Documentation Packet: The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations (Washington, D.C. October 1996).
Christopher Robbins, Air America (New York City, New York: Avon Books, 1985).
Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley, California: University of CA Press, 1991).
Murray Waas, "Cocaine and the White House Connection", Los Angeles Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6 and Oct. 7-13, 1988.
Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (New York City, New York: Warner Books, 1990).
Palin, with reputation as reformer, faces probe over firing
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Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, picked Friday to be Sen. John McCain's running mate in his pursuit of the presidency, has a reputation as a reformer in a state where the Republican party is under siege by prosecutors in a long-running corruption probe.
Palin shocked fellow Republicans in March when she quickly endorsed Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell in his primary bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Don Young, who has been Alaska's lone member of the U.S. House for three decades. Young has been the focus of federal prosecutors, though he has not been charged with a crime. The results of Tuesday's primary will not be known for several more days, but Young currently is leading Parnell by 151 votes out of more than 90,000 cast.
Palin also acted quickly in July to call for the resignation of State Sen. John Cowdery, the oldest member of the Alaska legislature and a Republican power when he was indicted on federal bribery charges for his role in an effort to buy the support of another senator in the battle over tax legislation favored by North Slope oil producers.
She has been more circumspect, however, regarding the highest profile corruption investigation involving an Alaska politician, the indictment of the state's senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, on charges he failed to report more than $250,000 in gifts from an Alaska businessman.
Stevens and Palin remain close. Palin's former chief of staff serves as manager of Steven's re-election campaign. Stevens trounced six opponents in Tuesday's Republican primary, but faces a tough November battle against Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. Stevens' trial on the seven-count indictment is set to begin Sept. 24 in Washington.
Palin also faces problems in her own state over what appears to have been questionable efforts by her staff to force the firing of her sister's ex-husband from the Alaska Public Safety Department. The state legislature hired a private investigator to investigate after the governor fired the head of the Public Safety Department, Walt Monegan, who says she did so because he would not fire the trooper.
After initially denying that her staff had brought pressure to have the trooper, Mike Wooten, who was involved in a child custody dispute with Palin's sister, dismissed, Palin had to reverse course after an audio recording emerged in which Frank Bailey, the governor's director of boards and commissions, urged the dismissal of the trooper.
Plain suspended Bailey, but she also admitted that people close to her, including her chief of staff, the state attorney general, and her husband also contacted Monegan about the trooper.
"Many of these inquiries were completely appropriate. However, the serial nature of the contacts could be perceived as some kind of pressure, presumably at my direction," Palin said.
Like most Alaskan politicians, Palin is an advocate of opening oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a position that puts her in conflict with McCain.
She recently was criticized as well for declaring herself opposed to a ballot measure that would have limited discharge from mining operations in the state. Proponents of the measure said she was attempting to improperly influence the outcome of the vote. The measure was overwhelmingly defeated on Tuesday.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, picked Friday to be Sen. John McCain's running mate in his pursuit of the presidency, has a reputation as a reformer in a state where the Republican party is under siege by prosecutors in a long-running corruption probe.
Palin shocked fellow Republicans in March when she quickly endorsed Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell in his primary bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Don Young, who has been Alaska's lone member of the U.S. House for three decades. Young has been the focus of federal prosecutors, though he has not been charged with a crime. The results of Tuesday's primary will not be known for several more days, but Young currently is leading Parnell by 151 votes out of more than 90,000 cast.
Palin also acted quickly in July to call for the resignation of State Sen. John Cowdery, the oldest member of the Alaska legislature and a Republican power when he was indicted on federal bribery charges for his role in an effort to buy the support of another senator in the battle over tax legislation favored by North Slope oil producers.
She has been more circumspect, however, regarding the highest profile corruption investigation involving an Alaska politician, the indictment of the state's senior U.S. senator, Ted Stevens, on charges he failed to report more than $250,000 in gifts from an Alaska businessman.
Stevens and Palin remain close. Palin's former chief of staff serves as manager of Steven's re-election campaign. Stevens trounced six opponents in Tuesday's Republican primary, but faces a tough November battle against Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. Stevens' trial on the seven-count indictment is set to begin Sept. 24 in Washington.
Palin also faces problems in her own state over what appears to have been questionable efforts by her staff to force the firing of her sister's ex-husband from the Alaska Public Safety Department. The state legislature hired a private investigator to investigate after the governor fired the head of the Public Safety Department, Walt Monegan, who says she did so because he would not fire the trooper.
After initially denying that her staff had brought pressure to have the trooper, Mike Wooten, who was involved in a child custody dispute with Palin's sister, dismissed, Palin had to reverse course after an audio recording emerged in which Frank Bailey, the governor's director of boards and commissions, urged the dismissal of the trooper.
Plain suspended Bailey, but she also admitted that people close to her, including her chief of staff, the state attorney general, and her husband also contacted Monegan about the trooper.
"Many of these inquiries were completely appropriate. However, the serial nature of the contacts could be perceived as some kind of pressure, presumably at my direction," Palin said.
Like most Alaskan politicians, Palin is an advocate of opening oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a position that puts her in conflict with McCain.
She recently was criticized as well for declaring herself opposed to a ballot measure that would have limited discharge from mining operations in the state. Proponents of the measure said she was attempting to improperly influence the outcome of the vote. The measure was overwhelmingly defeated on Tuesday.
Storm is called Gustav, but New Orleans hears 'Katrina'
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By Howard Witt
They had to cut short the funerals for the final seven victims of the last catastrophic hurricane so that officials could rush off to begin a massive evacuation Saturday ahead of the next one.
Precisely three years to the hour after Hurricane Katrina slammed into metropolitan New Orleans, flooding the city, killing more than 1,800 people and displacing at least a million others, city officials interred the last unidentified bodies of Katrina victims inside austere granite crypts at a new memorial cemetery.
Hundreds of bells were rung, a lone trumpet played a gospel hymn then the mayor, the police chief, the coroner and other emergency officials raced back to a command post Friday to prepare for a possible citywide evacuation ahead of Gustav, the storm newly elevated to hurricane status. If it stays on its current trajectory into the Gulf of Mexico, Gustav is aimed straight for the Louisiana coast.
"God is reminding us on the [anniversary] of Katrina that he can send Mother Nature back," said Russel Honore, the retired Army lieutenant general who commanded New Orleans rescue efforts after Katrina.
State and federal officials in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama—all of which could lie in Gustav's potential path—activated voluntary coastal evacuation plans beginning Saturday, with mandatory evacuation orders to follow early Sunday if necessary.
At its current speed, the National Hurricane Center warned, Gustav could strike the Gulf Coast on Monday afternoon as a major Category 3 or 4 storm after passing over the Cayman Islands and western Cuba before heading into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
A sense of foreboding and urgency mounted Friday across this stricken city still struggling to resurrect itself from Katrina's destruction even as local, state and federal officials declared that, unlike three years ago, they would not leave tens of thousands of the poorest New Orleanians behind to fend for themselves.
With the city's loose network of protective levees still only partially rebuilt after Katrina smashed them, 700 chartered buses headed toward New Orleans while mustering posts were readied across the city to accommodate an estimated 30,000 ailing, infirm or impoverished citizens without the means to evacuate themselves. They were to begin leaving the city Saturday morning for shelters in the interior of Louisiana and surrounding states.
A mandatory evacuation order for this below-sea-level city could come early Sunday morning, Mayor Ray Nagin announced, when "contraflow" provisions will kick in on the region's highways, directing all lanes away from the coast.
This time, officials said, there will be no "shelters of last resort" inside the city—meaning there will be no repeat of the hellish post-Katrina scenes at the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center, where tens of thousands of hurricane victims sweltered for nearly a week awaiting rescue.
Any of New Orleans' estimated 310,000 residents who ignore orders to leave accept "all responsibility for themselves and their loved ones," announced Jerry Sneed, the city's emergency preparedness director.
Meanwhile, schools and universities announced they would shut down well into the week. All the city's hotels planned to close down beginning Saturday as a way to force tourists to leave. Officials began transporting prisoners out of area jails. At least 1,500 National Guard troops arrived in the city to help keep order and enforce a curfew that's expected if the city is ordered to be emptied.
"I want to put everyone on alert that this storm is a very serious matter," Nagin told a news conference Friday afternoon.
"What you're going to see is the product of three years of planning, training and exercising at all levels of government, starting with the local and the state level and leading up to the federal level," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday from New Orleans. "So we're clearly better prepared."
Despite the official assurances that their property would be protected, many New Orleans business owners stung by the chaotic and lawless aftermath of Katrina were taking no chances.
ATMs along Canal Street sported fresh signs saying they would remain empty until after the storm passes. Workers who had been using plywood sheets to rebuild houses and businesses abruptly shifted their efforts to boarding up windows and doors as protection against looters.
"It's not the wind or the water I'm worried about," said Tyler Malejko as he nailed thick wooden planks to the window frames of his wife's upscale kitchen cabinetry store in the Mid-City neighborhood. "The police couldn't protect anybody the last time, and I have no confidence things will be any different now."
Elsewhere across the city, pockmarked with 65,000 blighted houses destroyed by Katrina and yet to be razed or rebuilt, there were signs of mounting psychological distress. Calls to a mental health hot line at the Louisiana State University medical center in New Orleans spiked Thursday and Friday.
"The stress is obviously compounded by the fact that there is now the threat of a major hurricane again," said Dr. Howard Osofsky, chairman of the LSU psychiatry department. "People are worrying what will happen to their homes they have worked so hard to rebuild. People are tired. They've been through so much."
Some beleaguered New Orleans residents were predicting they might choose to never return if Gustav drives them out again. Osofsky said he spoke with one exhausted professional who was planning a "last supper"—a dinner among friends before they evacuated the city forever.
Down in the Lower 9th Ward, one of the areas worst hit by Katrina's flooding, Willie Fernandez and his elderly mother were making a similarly grim calculation. After nearly three years spent painstakingly rebuilding his family's two homes on Caffin Avenue, Fernandez, a flooring contractor, was loading up a trailer with building materials and large home appliances and preparing to take his family to safety.
"This just reawakens all of Katrina's horrors," Fernandez said. "We are lifelong 9th Ward residents. But it really makes you wonder if it's all going to be worth it again."
By Howard Witt
They had to cut short the funerals for the final seven victims of the last catastrophic hurricane so that officials could rush off to begin a massive evacuation Saturday ahead of the next one.
Precisely three years to the hour after Hurricane Katrina slammed into metropolitan New Orleans, flooding the city, killing more than 1,800 people and displacing at least a million others, city officials interred the last unidentified bodies of Katrina victims inside austere granite crypts at a new memorial cemetery.
Hundreds of bells were rung, a lone trumpet played a gospel hymn then the mayor, the police chief, the coroner and other emergency officials raced back to a command post Friday to prepare for a possible citywide evacuation ahead of Gustav, the storm newly elevated to hurricane status. If it stays on its current trajectory into the Gulf of Mexico, Gustav is aimed straight for the Louisiana coast.
"God is reminding us on the [anniversary] of Katrina that he can send Mother Nature back," said Russel Honore, the retired Army lieutenant general who commanded New Orleans rescue efforts after Katrina.
State and federal officials in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama—all of which could lie in Gustav's potential path—activated voluntary coastal evacuation plans beginning Saturday, with mandatory evacuation orders to follow early Sunday if necessary.
At its current speed, the National Hurricane Center warned, Gustav could strike the Gulf Coast on Monday afternoon as a major Category 3 or 4 storm after passing over the Cayman Islands and western Cuba before heading into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
A sense of foreboding and urgency mounted Friday across this stricken city still struggling to resurrect itself from Katrina's destruction even as local, state and federal officials declared that, unlike three years ago, they would not leave tens of thousands of the poorest New Orleanians behind to fend for themselves.
With the city's loose network of protective levees still only partially rebuilt after Katrina smashed them, 700 chartered buses headed toward New Orleans while mustering posts were readied across the city to accommodate an estimated 30,000 ailing, infirm or impoverished citizens without the means to evacuate themselves. They were to begin leaving the city Saturday morning for shelters in the interior of Louisiana and surrounding states.
A mandatory evacuation order for this below-sea-level city could come early Sunday morning, Mayor Ray Nagin announced, when "contraflow" provisions will kick in on the region's highways, directing all lanes away from the coast.
This time, officials said, there will be no "shelters of last resort" inside the city—meaning there will be no repeat of the hellish post-Katrina scenes at the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center, where tens of thousands of hurricane victims sweltered for nearly a week awaiting rescue.
Any of New Orleans' estimated 310,000 residents who ignore orders to leave accept "all responsibility for themselves and their loved ones," announced Jerry Sneed, the city's emergency preparedness director.
Meanwhile, schools and universities announced they would shut down well into the week. All the city's hotels planned to close down beginning Saturday as a way to force tourists to leave. Officials began transporting prisoners out of area jails. At least 1,500 National Guard troops arrived in the city to help keep order and enforce a curfew that's expected if the city is ordered to be emptied.
"I want to put everyone on alert that this storm is a very serious matter," Nagin told a news conference Friday afternoon.
"What you're going to see is the product of three years of planning, training and exercising at all levels of government, starting with the local and the state level and leading up to the federal level," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday from New Orleans. "So we're clearly better prepared."
Despite the official assurances that their property would be protected, many New Orleans business owners stung by the chaotic and lawless aftermath of Katrina were taking no chances.
ATMs along Canal Street sported fresh signs saying they would remain empty until after the storm passes. Workers who had been using plywood sheets to rebuild houses and businesses abruptly shifted their efforts to boarding up windows and doors as protection against looters.
"It's not the wind or the water I'm worried about," said Tyler Malejko as he nailed thick wooden planks to the window frames of his wife's upscale kitchen cabinetry store in the Mid-City neighborhood. "The police couldn't protect anybody the last time, and I have no confidence things will be any different now."
Elsewhere across the city, pockmarked with 65,000 blighted houses destroyed by Katrina and yet to be razed or rebuilt, there were signs of mounting psychological distress. Calls to a mental health hot line at the Louisiana State University medical center in New Orleans spiked Thursday and Friday.
"The stress is obviously compounded by the fact that there is now the threat of a major hurricane again," said Dr. Howard Osofsky, chairman of the LSU psychiatry department. "People are worrying what will happen to their homes they have worked so hard to rebuild. People are tired. They've been through so much."
Some beleaguered New Orleans residents were predicting they might choose to never return if Gustav drives them out again. Osofsky said he spoke with one exhausted professional who was planning a "last supper"—a dinner among friends before they evacuated the city forever.
Down in the Lower 9th Ward, one of the areas worst hit by Katrina's flooding, Willie Fernandez and his elderly mother were making a similarly grim calculation. After nearly three years spent painstakingly rebuilding his family's two homes on Caffin Avenue, Fernandez, a flooring contractor, was loading up a trailer with building materials and large home appliances and preparing to take his family to safety.
"This just reawakens all of Katrina's horrors," Fernandez said. "We are lifelong 9th Ward residents. But it really makes you wonder if it's all going to be worth it again."
Study: Bankruptcies soar for senior citizens
Go to Original
Rate falling for those under 55 while many elderly retire with debt
First came the health problems. Then, unable to work, Ada Noda watched the bills pile up. And then, suffocating in debt, the 80-year-old did something she never thought she'd be forced to do.
She declared bankruptcy.
While the bankruptcy filing rate for those under 55 has fallen, it has soared for older Americans, according to a new analysis from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, which examined a sampling of noncommercial bankruptcies filed between 1991 and 2007.
The older the age group, the worse it got — people 65 and up became more than twice as likely to file during that period, and the filing rate for those 75 and older more than quadrupled.
"Older Americans are hit by a one-two punch of jobs and medical problems and the two are often intertwined," said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who was one of the authors of the study. "They discover that they must work to keep some form of economic balance and when they can't, they're lost."
That's precisely what happened to Noda. She worked all her life, on a hospital's housekeeping staff, and later selling boat tickets to tourists. She cut corners when she needed to but always paid the bills she neatly logged in a ledger.
"I was born during the Depression," she said. "I paid the bills whether I ate or didn't, whether I went to the doctor or not."
It all worked fine for Noda, a widow for 23 years, until she was forced to undergo double-bypass surgery and deal with respiratory problems. She started using two credit cards more frequently for food and bills. Before long, she was $8,000 in debt and behind on car payments.
"I'd go to bed and all I had on my mind was bankruptcy," she said. "I had nothing left."
Noda's car was repossessed, but her trailer home wasn't in jeopardy because her daughter owns it. While she's covered by Medicare and receives $968 in Social Security each month, she relied on her job for other expenses. She had no choice but to get help from Jacksonville Legal Aid and declare bankruptcy.
Most bankruptcies are still filed by people far younger than Noda, but the percentage the younger filers make up has fallen over the 16-year period, according to the Consumer Bankruptcy Project analysis, which will be published in the Harvard Law and Policy Review in January.
In 1991, the 55-plus age group accounted for about 8 percent of bankruptcy filers, according to the study, which looked at more than 6,000 cases filed in 1991, 2001 or 2007. By last year, filers 55 and over accounted for 22 percent.
Each age group under 55 saw double-digit percentage drops in their bankruptcy filing rates over the survey period, older Americans saw remarkable increases. The filing rate per thousand people ages 55-64 was up 40 percent; among 65- to 74-year-olds it increased 125 percent; and among the 75-to-84-year-old set, it was up 433 percent.
A number of factors are contributing to the increase. Higher prices for ordinary consumer goods have hit seniors on fixed budgets. For older Americans living below the poverty level, or not far above, a safety net likely doesn't exist for economic setbacks such as medical problems. And some fall prey to scams that cripple their finances.
Warren noted increasing numbers of Americans are entering their retirement years with significant debt and are still paying off mortgages. She said it was wrong to assume that lives of luxury are bankrupting seniors; rather, they're incurring debts to meet needs such as medical treatment.
"There's no evidence that the problem is consumerism," the professor said.
Nor is there a significant aging trend to blame. While the country is set to experience a notable age shift in the coming years, no major one took place between 1991, when the average age was 33, and 2007, when it was 36.
Frank and Hazel Peters lived frugally their entire 53-year marriage. They always rented a home but decided after the husband's retirement from a factory job that they would cash in his 401(k) and buy a manufactured home down a gravel road in tiny Hastings, a town of cornfields and potato farms.
But they fell victim to fraud when they tried to fix a plumbing problem that had black, sulphur-smelling water coming through the pipes of their new home without enough funds to fall back on. They declared bankruptcy.
"We knew we had no other option," 73-year-old Hazel Peters said. "We'd probably be out on the street."
Bankruptcy, tough no matter a person's age, is especially hard when you don't have many years left to recover. Warren said some seniors fear telling their families because they're afraid they'll be put in a nursing home if they're seen as unable to take care of their affairs.
Many who file also express a sense of relief.
Wilona Harris, 71, filed bankruptcy two years ago because of medical bills she and her husband accrued.
"This phone rang all the time. It made you not even want to pick up. Sometimes you think, 'Let me go jump off a bridge somewhere,'" Harris said at her Jacksonville home. "You have to cry and try and figure out what in the world could I do."
At least now, Harris says, she can fall asleep without crying.
Rate falling for those under 55 while many elderly retire with debt
First came the health problems. Then, unable to work, Ada Noda watched the bills pile up. And then, suffocating in debt, the 80-year-old did something she never thought she'd be forced to do.
She declared bankruptcy.
While the bankruptcy filing rate for those under 55 has fallen, it has soared for older Americans, according to a new analysis from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, which examined a sampling of noncommercial bankruptcies filed between 1991 and 2007.
The older the age group, the worse it got — people 65 and up became more than twice as likely to file during that period, and the filing rate for those 75 and older more than quadrupled.
"Older Americans are hit by a one-two punch of jobs and medical problems and the two are often intertwined," said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who was one of the authors of the study. "They discover that they must work to keep some form of economic balance and when they can't, they're lost."
That's precisely what happened to Noda. She worked all her life, on a hospital's housekeeping staff, and later selling boat tickets to tourists. She cut corners when she needed to but always paid the bills she neatly logged in a ledger.
"I was born during the Depression," she said. "I paid the bills whether I ate or didn't, whether I went to the doctor or not."
It all worked fine for Noda, a widow for 23 years, until she was forced to undergo double-bypass surgery and deal with respiratory problems. She started using two credit cards more frequently for food and bills. Before long, she was $8,000 in debt and behind on car payments.
"I'd go to bed and all I had on my mind was bankruptcy," she said. "I had nothing left."
Noda's car was repossessed, but her trailer home wasn't in jeopardy because her daughter owns it. While she's covered by Medicare and receives $968 in Social Security each month, she relied on her job for other expenses. She had no choice but to get help from Jacksonville Legal Aid and declare bankruptcy.
Most bankruptcies are still filed by people far younger than Noda, but the percentage the younger filers make up has fallen over the 16-year period, according to the Consumer Bankruptcy Project analysis, which will be published in the Harvard Law and Policy Review in January.
In 1991, the 55-plus age group accounted for about 8 percent of bankruptcy filers, according to the study, which looked at more than 6,000 cases filed in 1991, 2001 or 2007. By last year, filers 55 and over accounted for 22 percent.
Each age group under 55 saw double-digit percentage drops in their bankruptcy filing rates over the survey period, older Americans saw remarkable increases. The filing rate per thousand people ages 55-64 was up 40 percent; among 65- to 74-year-olds it increased 125 percent; and among the 75-to-84-year-old set, it was up 433 percent.
A number of factors are contributing to the increase. Higher prices for ordinary consumer goods have hit seniors on fixed budgets. For older Americans living below the poverty level, or not far above, a safety net likely doesn't exist for economic setbacks such as medical problems. And some fall prey to scams that cripple their finances.
Warren noted increasing numbers of Americans are entering their retirement years with significant debt and are still paying off mortgages. She said it was wrong to assume that lives of luxury are bankrupting seniors; rather, they're incurring debts to meet needs such as medical treatment.
"There's no evidence that the problem is consumerism," the professor said.
Nor is there a significant aging trend to blame. While the country is set to experience a notable age shift in the coming years, no major one took place between 1991, when the average age was 33, and 2007, when it was 36.
Frank and Hazel Peters lived frugally their entire 53-year marriage. They always rented a home but decided after the husband's retirement from a factory job that they would cash in his 401(k) and buy a manufactured home down a gravel road in tiny Hastings, a town of cornfields and potato farms.
But they fell victim to fraud when they tried to fix a plumbing problem that had black, sulphur-smelling water coming through the pipes of their new home without enough funds to fall back on. They declared bankruptcy.
"We knew we had no other option," 73-year-old Hazel Peters said. "We'd probably be out on the street."
Bankruptcy, tough no matter a person's age, is especially hard when you don't have many years left to recover. Warren said some seniors fear telling their families because they're afraid they'll be put in a nursing home if they're seen as unable to take care of their affairs.
Many who file also express a sense of relief.
Wilona Harris, 71, filed bankruptcy two years ago because of medical bills she and her husband accrued.
"This phone rang all the time. It made you not even want to pick up. Sometimes you think, 'Let me go jump off a bridge somewhere,'" Harris said at her Jacksonville home. "You have to cry and try and figure out what in the world could I do."
At least now, Harris says, she can fall asleep without crying.
Why CIA Veterans Are Scared of McCain
Go to Original
By Laura Rozen
This is part one of a two-part series on the main presidential candidates' intelligence policies. Next week we'll look at Barack Obama.
Tall, broad-shouldered, mustached, Michael Kostiw looks like the former oilman and CIA case officer in Africa he once was. Now, as Republican staff director for Sen. John McCain on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, Kostiw, 61, is probably the closest top former CIA official to the Republican presidential candidate, and is discussed as a possible candidate for a senior intelligence position should McCain win the presidency. But his relationship with his former Agency is complex. Standing in his large office in the Senate Russell building on a quiet day during August congressional recess, Kostiw shows off a pair of wooden statuettes that were given to him by an African nation's ambassador—and longtime top official in his country's government—to Washington. The envoy, Kostiw says, is an old contact that he proposed trying to recruit two decades ago when he was a CIA case officer in the country. But his Agency boss at the time waved him off the recruitment, saying, "That guy isn't going anywhere."
It's a small but telling anecdote in an almost two-hour conversation with a man whose career trajectory from CIA Soviet East Europe division operations officer to Texaco oilman to cochair of the International Republican Institute to top Porter Goss and McCain Senate aide may signal what a McCain presidency would mean for the intelligence community—and why many from the CIA are quietly worried about a McCain presidency. The Bush years have been brutal for the CIA, which was pilloried for getting Iraq intelligence wrong while accused of downplaying and withholding intelligence from the White House that would have justified military action. Many current and former US spies expect a McCain administration guided by neoconservatives to treat them with hostility and mistrust. They also say McCain would likely weaken the CIA by giving broad new spying authorities to the Pentagon, which CIA officials believe is more amenable to giving policymakers the intelligence they want, while being subject to less congressional oversight.
These critics point especially to the McCain campaign's top national security adviser Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann's record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators, to neoconservatives' disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. If McCain wins, "the military has won," says one former senior CIA officer. "We will no longer have a civilian intelligence arm. Yes, we will have analysts. But we won't have any real civilian intelligence capability."
"McCain would be an absolute disaster," says a second recently retired senior US intelligence operations officer. "He is prejudiced against the CIA. The day after the 2004 election when Bush won, McCain came on TV and gave an interview in which he said something to the effect of, 'The CIA tried to sabotage this election. They've made their bed and now they have to lay in it.' I used to like McCain, but he is inconsistent." Columnist Robert Novak quoted McCain in November 2004 as saying, "With CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization."
McCain is influenced by a circle of hardline Republican legislators and congressional staff as well as disgruntled former Agency officials "who all had these long-standing grudges against people in the Agency," the former senior intelligence officer said. "They think the CIA is a hotbed of liberals. Right-wing, nutty paranoia stuff. They all love the military and hate the CIA. Because the CIA tells them stuff they don't want to hear."
But Kostiw says such fears are overblown. He insists that McCain's national security inclinations are more independent than the neoconservative caste of his campaign's advisory brain trust would suggest. "McCain on intelligence will favor an OSS-type agency," Kostiw said, referring to the CIA's World War II-era predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. What does that mean? "An effective intelligence professional element that will take risks and will be responsive to civilian control and made up of the best and brightest officers the US has to offer." A civilian agency? "It has to have a civilian function, but will have a vast military element as well. I always say, you have to keep the Central in the Central Intelligence Agency."
"Lots of people talk to John on foreign policy matters—not just Randy Scheunemann," Kostiw adds, ticking off a list of realist Republican foreign policy hands: Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, General Jim Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former defense secretary James Schlesinger. But are these people really in McCain's inner circle? "The inner circle is the critical issue," Kostiw concedes.
"There has been a battle within the McCain campaign between neoconservatives and realists, but by and large, neoconservatives hold the high ground," says a former White House official now advising the Obama campaign on intelligence issues, on condition of anonymity. "And some of their positions have been deeply troubling," he added, citing McCain's proposal to kick Russia out of the group of eight leading industrialized countries.
Kostiw downplays any damage done by the McCain camp's rhetorical hostility to Moscow. And he says that McCain has been around so long, he is not overly susceptible to the influence of his national security brain trust. "I've been in meetings with McCain, where some adviser is discussing a policy issue," Kostiw said. "And at the end, McCain thanks them and says he's made up his own mind, and the outcome is the other way." Take his position against torture, Kostiw points out, a position that put McCain at stark odds with the Bush/Cheney White House.
But former CIA hands say they have heard such reassurances from Kostiw before—about former House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, who served as CIA director from 2004 until his sudden resignation in 2006—and they proved delusionally unfounded. "Mike [Kostiw] is a nice guy," says the former senior CIA operations officer. "But this is the guy who sat around talking to all of us when Porter came in [as CIA director in 2004], and told us how much Porter respected us, and not to worry about the stories we hear. He was trying to reassure us that Goss was not out to destroy the Agency. He told us everything is going to be fine." Goss (for whom Kostiw was a special adviser) brought to Langley several ultrapartisan House Republican aides—the "Gosslings"—whose hostility to the Agency's senior operations officers and conviction that they were not loyal to the Republican president was so blatant, it led to the angry departure of the two top operations veterans—and dozens more—and sent morale plummeting. After Goss' proposal that Kostiw serve in the CIA No. 3 spot crumbled when it was leaked that Kostiw had been fired from the Agency two decades earlier, allegedly for not paying for a package of bacon from a grocery store (some colleagues say that was just the cover story, and that Kostiw had in fact left the Agency for other financial-related reasons), Goss, against the advice of senior CIA officers, appointed a controversial, womanizing administrative officer, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, to be the CIA executive director. Foggo's indictment on corruption charges related to the Congressman Duke Cunningham corruption case in May 2006 coincided with Goss' abrupt resignation the same month. (Foggo is slated to go on trial in October.) The top two Agency operations vets who had quit in disputes with the Gosslings—Steve Kappes and Michael Sulick—returned to the Agency after Goss' departure. And Kostiw, after serving as Goss' "special adviser" at the Agency, went to work for McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Kostiw may insist that a McCain presidency would steer away from his advisers' ideological zeal. But his fellow former intelligence officers are skeptical, fearing his assurances will prove as overly optimistic as his promises to them about Goss.
By Laura Rozen
This is part one of a two-part series on the main presidential candidates' intelligence policies. Next week we'll look at Barack Obama.
Tall, broad-shouldered, mustached, Michael Kostiw looks like the former oilman and CIA case officer in Africa he once was. Now, as Republican staff director for Sen. John McCain on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, Kostiw, 61, is probably the closest top former CIA official to the Republican presidential candidate, and is discussed as a possible candidate for a senior intelligence position should McCain win the presidency. But his relationship with his former Agency is complex. Standing in his large office in the Senate Russell building on a quiet day during August congressional recess, Kostiw shows off a pair of wooden statuettes that were given to him by an African nation's ambassador—and longtime top official in his country's government—to Washington. The envoy, Kostiw says, is an old contact that he proposed trying to recruit two decades ago when he was a CIA case officer in the country. But his Agency boss at the time waved him off the recruitment, saying, "That guy isn't going anywhere."
It's a small but telling anecdote in an almost two-hour conversation with a man whose career trajectory from CIA Soviet East Europe division operations officer to Texaco oilman to cochair of the International Republican Institute to top Porter Goss and McCain Senate aide may signal what a McCain presidency would mean for the intelligence community—and why many from the CIA are quietly worried about a McCain presidency. The Bush years have been brutal for the CIA, which was pilloried for getting Iraq intelligence wrong while accused of downplaying and withholding intelligence from the White House that would have justified military action. Many current and former US spies expect a McCain administration guided by neoconservatives to treat them with hostility and mistrust. They also say McCain would likely weaken the CIA by giving broad new spying authorities to the Pentagon, which CIA officials believe is more amenable to giving policymakers the intelligence they want, while being subject to less congressional oversight.
These critics point especially to the McCain campaign's top national security adviser Randy Scheunemann—who ran a front group promoting war with Iraq and the fabrications of controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and who has lobbied for aggressive NATO expansion. Scheunemann's record, they argue, encapsulates everything wrong with the past eight years of Bush leadership on intelligence issues, from a penchant for foreign policy freelancing and secret contacts with unreliable fabricators, to neoconservatives' disdain for the perceived bureaucratic timidity of the CIA and State Department, to their avowed hostility for diplomacy with adversaries. If McCain wins, "the military has won," says one former senior CIA officer. "We will no longer have a civilian intelligence arm. Yes, we will have analysts. But we won't have any real civilian intelligence capability."
"McCain would be an absolute disaster," says a second recently retired senior US intelligence operations officer. "He is prejudiced against the CIA. The day after the 2004 election when Bush won, McCain came on TV and gave an interview in which he said something to the effect of, 'The CIA tried to sabotage this election. They've made their bed and now they have to lay in it.' I used to like McCain, but he is inconsistent." Columnist Robert Novak quoted McCain in November 2004 as saying, "With CIA leaks intended to harm the re-election campaign of the president of the United States, it is not only dysfunctional but a rogue organization."
McCain is influenced by a circle of hardline Republican legislators and congressional staff as well as disgruntled former Agency officials "who all had these long-standing grudges against people in the Agency," the former senior intelligence officer said. "They think the CIA is a hotbed of liberals. Right-wing, nutty paranoia stuff. They all love the military and hate the CIA. Because the CIA tells them stuff they don't want to hear."
But Kostiw says such fears are overblown. He insists that McCain's national security inclinations are more independent than the neoconservative caste of his campaign's advisory brain trust would suggest. "McCain on intelligence will favor an OSS-type agency," Kostiw said, referring to the CIA's World War II-era predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. What does that mean? "An effective intelligence professional element that will take risks and will be responsive to civilian control and made up of the best and brightest officers the US has to offer." A civilian agency? "It has to have a civilian function, but will have a vast military element as well. I always say, you have to keep the Central in the Central Intelligence Agency."
"Lots of people talk to John on foreign policy matters—not just Randy Scheunemann," Kostiw adds, ticking off a list of realist Republican foreign policy hands: Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, General Jim Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former defense secretary James Schlesinger. But are these people really in McCain's inner circle? "The inner circle is the critical issue," Kostiw concedes.
"There has been a battle within the McCain campaign between neoconservatives and realists, but by and large, neoconservatives hold the high ground," says a former White House official now advising the Obama campaign on intelligence issues, on condition of anonymity. "And some of their positions have been deeply troubling," he added, citing McCain's proposal to kick Russia out of the group of eight leading industrialized countries.
Kostiw downplays any damage done by the McCain camp's rhetorical hostility to Moscow. And he says that McCain has been around so long, he is not overly susceptible to the influence of his national security brain trust. "I've been in meetings with McCain, where some adviser is discussing a policy issue," Kostiw said. "And at the end, McCain thanks them and says he's made up his own mind, and the outcome is the other way." Take his position against torture, Kostiw points out, a position that put McCain at stark odds with the Bush/Cheney White House.
But former CIA hands say they have heard such reassurances from Kostiw before—about former House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, who served as CIA director from 2004 until his sudden resignation in 2006—and they proved delusionally unfounded. "Mike [Kostiw] is a nice guy," says the former senior CIA operations officer. "But this is the guy who sat around talking to all of us when Porter came in [as CIA director in 2004], and told us how much Porter respected us, and not to worry about the stories we hear. He was trying to reassure us that Goss was not out to destroy the Agency. He told us everything is going to be fine." Goss (for whom Kostiw was a special adviser) brought to Langley several ultrapartisan House Republican aides—the "Gosslings"—whose hostility to the Agency's senior operations officers and conviction that they were not loyal to the Republican president was so blatant, it led to the angry departure of the two top operations veterans—and dozens more—and sent morale plummeting. After Goss' proposal that Kostiw serve in the CIA No. 3 spot crumbled when it was leaked that Kostiw had been fired from the Agency two decades earlier, allegedly for not paying for a package of bacon from a grocery store (some colleagues say that was just the cover story, and that Kostiw had in fact left the Agency for other financial-related reasons), Goss, against the advice of senior CIA officers, appointed a controversial, womanizing administrative officer, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, to be the CIA executive director. Foggo's indictment on corruption charges related to the Congressman Duke Cunningham corruption case in May 2006 coincided with Goss' abrupt resignation the same month. (Foggo is slated to go on trial in October.) The top two Agency operations vets who had quit in disputes with the Gosslings—Steve Kappes and Michael Sulick—returned to the Agency after Goss' departure. And Kostiw, after serving as Goss' "special adviser" at the Agency, went to work for McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Kostiw may insist that a McCain presidency would steer away from his advisers' ideological zeal. But his fellow former intelligence officers are skeptical, fearing his assurances will prove as overly optimistic as his promises to them about Goss.
The Dark Side Of The "Free World"
Go to Original
By Rob Gowland
The book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, published in mid-July, is written by US journalist Jane Mayer, whose specialty is writing about counter-terrorism for The New Yorker.
The book has particularly peeved the CIA and its boss in the White House for, apparently, Ms Mayer has had access to a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross issued last year labelling the CIA’s interrogation methods for "high-level Qaeda prisoners" as "categorically" torture. In consequence, the Bush administration officials who approved these methods would be guilty of war crimes.
The book says the Red Cross report was shared with the CIA, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
It would not be the first time of course that US authorities (civil, intelligence or military) have indulged in or turned a blind eye to torture or other forms of horrifying brutality.
One thinks of their blood-soaked activities to thwart the former Communist Resistance leaders from gaining political power in Western Europe after WW2, or their even more bloody destruction of democracy in Guatemala or Chile, El Salvador and pre-Castro Cuba.
The many atrocities by US forces in Korea and Vietnam were far too numerous to be the work of "rotten apples"; they were clearly the result of US government and military policy, just like the actions of the US military in charge of the Abu Graib prison in Iraq.
A society that bases itself on force and brutality, on state terrorism, while simultaneously indulging in the most hypocritical lip-service to the ideals of humaneness and justice, cannot but find excuses for torture.
Only last year or the year before, Amnesty International — an organisation not noted for being hostile to the USA — stated that the procedures in many US civilian jails amounted to torture. Military prisons operated by the US in other countries must surely be hell on earth.
Red Cross representatives were only permitted to interview high-level "terrorist" detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Until then, while the prisoners were being "interrogated" in the CIA’s secret prisons, the Red Cross was not given access to them.
It is now well known that these secret prisons are located in US client states, some in Eastern Europe where anti-Communist regimes are all too willing to co-operate with their US backers, and some in states like Egypt that are equally dependent on US support. Significantly, they all practice torture.
We have all seen the images from Guantánamo Bay of prisoners, shackled and manacled, stumbling along with a guard on either side. But all the time, the particularly frightening threat hangs over them of being taken from there and returned to one of the secret prisons away from any prying eyes.
In testimony to the Red Cross, Abu Zubaydah, the first major Al Qaeda figure the United States captured, told how he was confined in a box "so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the foetal position" and was one of several prisoners to be "slammed against the walls".
The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were water-boarded, a form of torture in which water is poured in the nose and mouth of the victim to simulate the sensation of suffocation and drowning.
The Pentagon and the CIA have both defended water-boarding on the same grounds: "because it works", the torturer’s classic justification. Jane Mayer’s book says Abu Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he had been water-boarded at least ten times in a single week and as many as three times in a day.
The Red Cross report says that another high level prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the attacks of September 11, 2001, told them that he had been kept naked for more than a month and claimed that he had been "kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room".
A New York Times article on the report says the prisoners considered the "most excruciating" of the methods was being shackled to the ceiling and being forced to stand for as long as eight hours. This is a well-known torture technique that has severe physical effects on the victim’s body.
According to The New York Times article, eleven of the 14 prisoners reported to the Red Cross that they had suffered prolonged sleep deprivation, including "bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds 24 hours a day".
The New York Times reported that a CIA spokesman had confirmed that Red Cross workers had been "granted access to the detained terrorists at Guantánamo and heard their claims".
The same CIA spokesman said the agency’s interrogations were based on "detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice" and had "produced solid information that has contributed directly to the disruption of terrorist activities". There’s that justification of torture again.
Bernard Barrett of the International Committee of the Red Cross declined to comment on the book when asked by The New York Times. He did not deny any of the book’s claims, but regretted "that any information has been attributed to us" because, it seems, the International Committee of the Red Cross "believes its work is more effective when confidential"!
He went on to say: "We have an ongoing confidential dialogue with members of the US intelligence community, and we would share any observations or recommendations with them."
So that’s OK then.
By Rob Gowland
The book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, published in mid-July, is written by US journalist Jane Mayer, whose specialty is writing about counter-terrorism for The New Yorker.
The book has particularly peeved the CIA and its boss in the White House for, apparently, Ms Mayer has had access to a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross issued last year labelling the CIA’s interrogation methods for "high-level Qaeda prisoners" as "categorically" torture. In consequence, the Bush administration officials who approved these methods would be guilty of war crimes.
The book says the Red Cross report was shared with the CIA, President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
It would not be the first time of course that US authorities (civil, intelligence or military) have indulged in or turned a blind eye to torture or other forms of horrifying brutality.
One thinks of their blood-soaked activities to thwart the former Communist Resistance leaders from gaining political power in Western Europe after WW2, or their even more bloody destruction of democracy in Guatemala or Chile, El Salvador and pre-Castro Cuba.
The many atrocities by US forces in Korea and Vietnam were far too numerous to be the work of "rotten apples"; they were clearly the result of US government and military policy, just like the actions of the US military in charge of the Abu Graib prison in Iraq.
A society that bases itself on force and brutality, on state terrorism, while simultaneously indulging in the most hypocritical lip-service to the ideals of humaneness and justice, cannot but find excuses for torture.
Only last year or the year before, Amnesty International — an organisation not noted for being hostile to the USA — stated that the procedures in many US civilian jails amounted to torture. Military prisons operated by the US in other countries must surely be hell on earth.
Red Cross representatives were only permitted to interview high-level "terrorist" detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention centre in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Until then, while the prisoners were being "interrogated" in the CIA’s secret prisons, the Red Cross was not given access to them.
It is now well known that these secret prisons are located in US client states, some in Eastern Europe where anti-Communist regimes are all too willing to co-operate with their US backers, and some in states like Egypt that are equally dependent on US support. Significantly, they all practice torture.
We have all seen the images from Guantánamo Bay of prisoners, shackled and manacled, stumbling along with a guard on either side. But all the time, the particularly frightening threat hangs over them of being taken from there and returned to one of the secret prisons away from any prying eyes.
In testimony to the Red Cross, Abu Zubaydah, the first major Al Qaeda figure the United States captured, told how he was confined in a box "so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the foetal position" and was one of several prisoners to be "slammed against the walls".
The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were water-boarded, a form of torture in which water is poured in the nose and mouth of the victim to simulate the sensation of suffocation and drowning.
The Pentagon and the CIA have both defended water-boarding on the same grounds: "because it works", the torturer’s classic justification. Jane Mayer’s book says Abu Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he had been water-boarded at least ten times in a single week and as many as three times in a day.
The Red Cross report says that another high level prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the attacks of September 11, 2001, told them that he had been kept naked for more than a month and claimed that he had been "kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room".
A New York Times article on the report says the prisoners considered the "most excruciating" of the methods was being shackled to the ceiling and being forced to stand for as long as eight hours. This is a well-known torture technique that has severe physical effects on the victim’s body.
According to The New York Times article, eleven of the 14 prisoners reported to the Red Cross that they had suffered prolonged sleep deprivation, including "bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds 24 hours a day".
The New York Times reported that a CIA spokesman had confirmed that Red Cross workers had been "granted access to the detained terrorists at Guantánamo and heard their claims".
The same CIA spokesman said the agency’s interrogations were based on "detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice" and had "produced solid information that has contributed directly to the disruption of terrorist activities". There’s that justification of torture again.
Bernard Barrett of the International Committee of the Red Cross declined to comment on the book when asked by The New York Times. He did not deny any of the book’s claims, but regretted "that any information has been attributed to us" because, it seems, the International Committee of the Red Cross "believes its work is more effective when confidential"!
He went on to say: "We have an ongoing confidential dialogue with members of the US intelligence community, and we would share any observations or recommendations with them."
So that’s OK then.
Stars, Stripes, War and Shame
Go to Original
By MISSY COMLEY BEATTIE
The Pentagon says “only” five civilians were killed Friday, a week ago, by US aerial bombardment. According to Afghan officials and a United Nations report, 90 Afghan civilians died, 60 of whom were children.
By MISSY COMLEY BEATTIE
The Pentagon says “only” five civilians were killed Friday, a week ago, by US aerial bombardment. According to Afghan officials and a United Nations report, 90 Afghan civilians died, 60 of whom were children.
Just days after this carnage, the Democrats, so many dressed in red, white, and blue, opened their convention in Denver. In the wake of the barbarity in Afghanistan and the continued suicide bombings in Iraq, the revelry and flag waving in Colorado seemed inappropriate. Sure, I understand that hope was and is in the air, but I reached for the remote and powered off.
Thursday night, I tuned in to hear a sweet, young voice, pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of American. “With freedom and justice for all.”
Freedom and justice are concepts we can no longer take for granted. They aren’t guaranteed by stars, stripes, and platitudes. The truth is that George and Dick have sucked the life out of our Constitution, aided by Congressional Republicans and Democrats as well as too many among the electorate who are guilty by reason of fear or complacency.
The events of 9/11 sent masses rushing to either purchase or dust off their Bibles and reference scripture for guidance and to to justify “an eye for an eye.” Never mind that we leveled a country with no link to those who used our commercial airplanes as weapons. The attack on our soil provided the neocons the excuse they needed to implement their plan for domination of Earth’s bounties. Add to this the groupies convinced that George Bush was chosen by God to be president at this particular time of crisis. That Bush himself believed this should have been a red-flag warming that the path he demanded we follow would lead us, not to an Eden of security and prosperity but, to a miasma of endless conflict and contempt from most of the world.
The warmongers forgot the song learned in childhood:
“Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
The lyrics crawl through my consciousness as war rages on and candidates for the highest office in our land spar in their own war of words for the power prize, which is the authority to declare war. To John Bomb Bomb McCain, war is something about which to joke, promote, and accelerate. He reminds us repeatedly of his years as a tortured prisoner of war. Yet he never mentions the targets whose eyes he didn’t see--all those Vietnamese peasants, men, women, and children, whose bodies he melted. For Barack Obama who opposed the invasion of Iraq but, without fail, has voted to fund it, the prudent foreign policy strategy is to send more troops to the “right” hotspot, Afghanistan. Russia must love this.
Monday is the beginning of the Republican version of Denver. When McCain, who seems to have a "thing" for beauty queens, speaks, we’ll probably hear about that trip he’s going to take to the “gates of hell.” Also, he’ll offer the usual “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here,” and “if we leave too soon, they’ll follow us home,” and that we “must achieve victory.”
But no one is defining victory, so allow me: Victory is pledging allegiance to peace.
Imagine if we had a candidate who said:
So much of the history of our country has been sanitized. The truth is that we have battled unnecessarily, illegally, immorally. We have sent our sons and daughters to die, to return maimed, to sustain traumatic brain injuries and post traumatic stress disorder while destroying the lives of those we call the enemy, the other. We have invaded for resources that we call our “interests” and for superior positioning. Just to show we can. Just to show our might. Not to defend ourselves. I say no more. Not on my watch. As your president, I pledge allegiance to the people. I pledge allegiance to peace.
Actually, we do have aspirants who have said as much. Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney certainly are transformational choices. Bob Barr, the Libertarian, gets it, too, when he says that war “should be the last rather than the first resort.” But our corporate media give them little credibility and even less airtime.
So, we wait. Some wave their flags and hope while others feel despair and shame at what continues to be done in our names.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Police continue repressive tactics in Denver
Go to Original
By Tom Eley
In the two days since Denver police—acting at the direction of U.S. Secret Service—attacked and jailed nearly 100 peaceful protesters outside the Democratic National Convention, the virtual militarization of Denver has continued. In total, over 130 protesters have now been imprisoned.
As late as Tuesday afternoon, fifteen hours after the arrests, about 60 protesters were still being held at a makeshift detention center, sarcastically called “Gitmo on the Platte” by protesters, as well as in a downtown city jail. By Wednesday most of those detained had been released after posting a $500 bond. The protesters were processed in specially-created kangaroo courts dubbed “DNC Courts.”
The WSWS spoke with Brian Vincente, a lawyer for the People’s Law Project, which is representing many of the protesters. Vincente said that lawyers were denied access to prisoners at the detention center. Then city officials attempted to process many of those arrested in the middle of the night.
Vincente said that the city has been preparing the special court system for over one year, but “instead of creating something streamlined and smooth, they came up with this night court to slam people through.” Vincente has represented people mistakenly arrested by police, including school teachers who were on their way to work.
Police arrests and provocations continue. On Wednesday afternoon, the coordinating center for the protest group Unconventional Denver was raided and equipment used to make banners was seized. Riot police pulled up in an armored personnel carrier, entered the building and arrested two.
On Tuesday, police struck a Code Pink antiwar protester, Alicia Forest, in the face with a baton.
A Kansas pastor and religious extremist, Ruben Israel, and a small group of supporters had begun a confrontation with anti-war protesters, taunting them. A Recreate ’68 organizer, Carlo Garcia, approached police to request that they remove the pastor, as Recreate ’68 had a permit to use the public park where the confrontation took place, and Israel’s organization, Bible Believers, did not. Instead, police arrested Garcia.
In a scene captured on video and posted on YouTube, Forest can be seen approaching the police to ask for an explanation. The officer responds by striking her with his truncheon and saying “back it up, bitch.” Moments later, as she is being interviewed, Forest is grabbed suddenly by her arm and apprehended by several police. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfISlq1gzK8)
Right wing counter-demonstrators, far fewer in number, have targeted and harassed the anti-war protesters. The right wing protesters have faced less repression from the police, and in some cases, such as the police assault on Forest, have received de facto police protection.
However, thirteen anti-abortion zealots of Operation Rescue, including its founder Randall Terry, were arrested on Monday for blocking a security gate at the Pepsi Center—though it is difficult to imagine that the anti-war protesters would have been allowed to get so close. Elsewhere, an anti-immigrant rally of the fascistic Minutemen organization drew only about a dozen participants. The small gathering was addressed by the ultra-reactionary politicians Tom Tancredo, Bob Barr and Alan Keyes.
As of today, no major Democratic figure has called for a lessening of the level of police repression in Denver, or for the release of those protesters who are still imprisoned. One delegate to the convention, Syracuse Democrat Alfonso Davis, confessed to being surprised by the magnitude of the police presence. “This is not my first Democrat National Convention,” he said, but “I’ve never seen this type of law enforcement presence. This is, I would say, a little intrusive.”
Police preparations are underway in St. Paul and Minneapolis for next week’s Republican National Convention, which promises to draw more protesters. According to the National Lawyers Guild, three videographers from New York City had their equipment confiscated by members of the Minneapolis Police Department on Tuesday morning. The videographers had planned to record police interaction with protesters during the RNC. Meanwhile, the Associated Press has reported that a makeshift prison encampment has been created out of a parking area in a police complex in St. Paul.
By Tom Eley
In the two days since Denver police—acting at the direction of U.S. Secret Service—attacked and jailed nearly 100 peaceful protesters outside the Democratic National Convention, the virtual militarization of Denver has continued. In total, over 130 protesters have now been imprisoned.
As late as Tuesday afternoon, fifteen hours after the arrests, about 60 protesters were still being held at a makeshift detention center, sarcastically called “Gitmo on the Platte” by protesters, as well as in a downtown city jail. By Wednesday most of those detained had been released after posting a $500 bond. The protesters were processed in specially-created kangaroo courts dubbed “DNC Courts.”
The WSWS spoke with Brian Vincente, a lawyer for the People’s Law Project, which is representing many of the protesters. Vincente said that lawyers were denied access to prisoners at the detention center. Then city officials attempted to process many of those arrested in the middle of the night.
Vincente said that the city has been preparing the special court system for over one year, but “instead of creating something streamlined and smooth, they came up with this night court to slam people through.” Vincente has represented people mistakenly arrested by police, including school teachers who were on their way to work.
Police arrests and provocations continue. On Wednesday afternoon, the coordinating center for the protest group Unconventional Denver was raided and equipment used to make banners was seized. Riot police pulled up in an armored personnel carrier, entered the building and arrested two.
On Tuesday, police struck a Code Pink antiwar protester, Alicia Forest, in the face with a baton.
A Kansas pastor and religious extremist, Ruben Israel, and a small group of supporters had begun a confrontation with anti-war protesters, taunting them. A Recreate ’68 organizer, Carlo Garcia, approached police to request that they remove the pastor, as Recreate ’68 had a permit to use the public park where the confrontation took place, and Israel’s organization, Bible Believers, did not. Instead, police arrested Garcia.
In a scene captured on video and posted on YouTube, Forest can be seen approaching the police to ask for an explanation. The officer responds by striking her with his truncheon and saying “back it up, bitch.” Moments later, as she is being interviewed, Forest is grabbed suddenly by her arm and apprehended by several police. (See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfISlq1gzK8)
Right wing counter-demonstrators, far fewer in number, have targeted and harassed the anti-war protesters. The right wing protesters have faced less repression from the police, and in some cases, such as the police assault on Forest, have received de facto police protection.
However, thirteen anti-abortion zealots of Operation Rescue, including its founder Randall Terry, were arrested on Monday for blocking a security gate at the Pepsi Center—though it is difficult to imagine that the anti-war protesters would have been allowed to get so close. Elsewhere, an anti-immigrant rally of the fascistic Minutemen organization drew only about a dozen participants. The small gathering was addressed by the ultra-reactionary politicians Tom Tancredo, Bob Barr and Alan Keyes.
As of today, no major Democratic figure has called for a lessening of the level of police repression in Denver, or for the release of those protesters who are still imprisoned. One delegate to the convention, Syracuse Democrat Alfonso Davis, confessed to being surprised by the magnitude of the police presence. “This is not my first Democrat National Convention,” he said, but “I’ve never seen this type of law enforcement presence. This is, I would say, a little intrusive.”
Police preparations are underway in St. Paul and Minneapolis for next week’s Republican National Convention, which promises to draw more protesters. According to the National Lawyers Guild, three videographers from New York City had their equipment confiscated by members of the Minneapolis Police Department on Tuesday morning. The videographers had planned to record police interaction with protesters during the RNC. Meanwhile, the Associated Press has reported that a makeshift prison encampment has been created out of a parking area in a police complex in St. Paul.
US warning to court in alleged torture case
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By Duncan Campbell
The US state department yesterday warned that disclosure of secret information in the case of a British resident said to have been tortured before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay would cause "serious and lasting damage" to security relations between the countries.
Stephen Mathias, a legal adviser to the department, also claimed that the "national security of the UK" would be affected by disclosure of the details of the detention and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed, 30, who is accused of conspiring with al-Qaida.
Lawyers for the Ethiopian national have been arguing in the high court that they should have access to details of his interrogation from the time he was detained in 2002 until he was taken to Guantánamo Bay - where he is still held - in 2004. Mohamed claims that he was tortured by, among other methods, having his penis cut with a razor blade.
In an email to the Foreign Office, which was read out to the court, Mathias said disclosure would cause "serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence-sharing relationship and thus the national security of the UK".
Ben Jaffey, for Mohamed, told the court that the US had said 44 documents would be made available to the "convening authority" in the US which will decide on Mohamed's prosecution but not to his legal representatives, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley and Clive Stafford-Smith, of Reprieve, although both had been security-cleared in the US.
Jaffey said there was "no movement on the central question - where was Mr Mohamed between 2002 and 2004?" Tim Eicke, for the government, said the US had made concessions by making documents available to the convening authority.
After hearing from both sides in open court, the judges retired to hear further arguments in private. No decision was made last night but a ruling is expected tomorrow.
Mohamed, a UK resident, was initially held in Pakistan in 2002 and was later secretly rendered to Morocco, where he claimed that he was tortured and had his penis lacerated while further threats were made. He was then flown by the US authorities to Afghanistan, where he claims he was subjected to further ill-treatment and interrogation. In September 2004, he was taken to Guantánamo Bay. He claims that all his confessions were a result of torture. He faces the death penalty.
Last week, in the initial hearing of the case, the high court found that MI5 had participated in the unlawful interrogation of Mohamed. One MI5 officer was so concerned about incriminating himself that he initially declined to answer questions from the judges, even in private.
Although the judges said that "no adverse conclusions" should be drawn by the plea against self-incrimination, it was disclosed that the officer, Witness B, was questioned about alleged war crimes, including torture.
David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has provided the US with documents about the case. He has declined to release further evidence, arguing that disclosure would harm the intelligence relationship with the US.
By Duncan Campbell
The US state department yesterday warned that disclosure of secret information in the case of a British resident said to have been tortured before he was sent to Guantánamo Bay would cause "serious and lasting damage" to security relations between the countries.
Stephen Mathias, a legal adviser to the department, also claimed that the "national security of the UK" would be affected by disclosure of the details of the detention and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed, 30, who is accused of conspiring with al-Qaida.
Lawyers for the Ethiopian national have been arguing in the high court that they should have access to details of his interrogation from the time he was detained in 2002 until he was taken to Guantánamo Bay - where he is still held - in 2004. Mohamed claims that he was tortured by, among other methods, having his penis cut with a razor blade.
In an email to the Foreign Office, which was read out to the court, Mathias said disclosure would cause "serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence-sharing relationship and thus the national security of the UK".
Ben Jaffey, for Mohamed, told the court that the US had said 44 documents would be made available to the "convening authority" in the US which will decide on Mohamed's prosecution but not to his legal representatives, Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley and Clive Stafford-Smith, of Reprieve, although both had been security-cleared in the US.
Jaffey said there was "no movement on the central question - where was Mr Mohamed between 2002 and 2004?" Tim Eicke, for the government, said the US had made concessions by making documents available to the convening authority.
After hearing from both sides in open court, the judges retired to hear further arguments in private. No decision was made last night but a ruling is expected tomorrow.
Mohamed, a UK resident, was initially held in Pakistan in 2002 and was later secretly rendered to Morocco, where he claimed that he was tortured and had his penis lacerated while further threats were made. He was then flown by the US authorities to Afghanistan, where he claims he was subjected to further ill-treatment and interrogation. In September 2004, he was taken to Guantánamo Bay. He claims that all his confessions were a result of torture. He faces the death penalty.
Last week, in the initial hearing of the case, the high court found that MI5 had participated in the unlawful interrogation of Mohamed. One MI5 officer was so concerned about incriminating himself that he initially declined to answer questions from the judges, even in private.
Although the judges said that "no adverse conclusions" should be drawn by the plea against self-incrimination, it was disclosed that the officer, Witness B, was questioned about alleged war crimes, including torture.
David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has provided the US with documents about the case. He has declined to release further evidence, arguing that disclosure would harm the intelligence relationship with the US.
Not the Same as Being Equal
Go to Original
By Ann Jones
Women in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones
Women in Afghanistan
Born in Afghanistan but raised in the United States, like many in the worldwide Afghan Diaspora, Manizha Naderi is devoted to helping her homeland. For years she worked with Women for Afghan Women, a New York based organization serving Afghan women wherever they may be. Last fall, she returned to Kabul, the capital, to try to create a Family Guidance Center. Its goal was to rescue women -- and their families -- from homemade violence. It’s tough work. After three decades of almost constant warfare, most citizens are programmed to answer the slightest challenge with violence. In Afghanistan it’s the default response.
Manizha Naderi has been sizing up the problem in the capital and last week she sent me a copy of her report. A key passage went like this:
"During the past year, a rash of reports on the situation of women in Afghanistan has been issued by Afghan governmental agencies and by foreign and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that claim a particular interest in women’s rights or in Afghanistan or both. More reports are in the offing. What has sparked them is the dire situation of women in the country, the systematic violations of their human rights, and the failure of concerned parties to achieve significant improvements by providing women with legal protections rooted in a capable, honest, and stable judiciary system, education and employment opportunities, safety from violence, much of it savage, and protection from hidebound customs originating in the conviction that women are the property of men."
I’d hoped for better news. Instead, her report brought back so many things I’d seen for myself during the last five years spent, off and on, in her country.
****
Last year in Herat, as I was walking with an Afghan colleague to a meeting on women’s rights, I spotted an ice cream vendor in the hot, dusty street. I rushed ahead and returned with two cones of lemony ice. I held one out to my friend. "Forgive me," she said. "I can’t." She was wearing a burqa.
It was a stupid mistake. I’d been in Afghanistan a long time, in the company every day of women encased from head to toe in pleated polyester body bags. Occasionally I put one on myself, just to get the feel of being stifled in the sweaty sack, blind behind the mesh eye mask. I’d watched women trip on their burqas and fall. I’d watched women collide with cars they couldn’t see. I knew a woman badly burned when her burqa caught fire. I knew another who suffered a near-fatal skull fracture when her burqa snagged in a taxi door and slammed her to the pavement as the vehicle sped away. But I’d never before noted this fact: it is not possible for a woman wearing a burqa to eat an ice cream cone.
We gave the cones away to passing children and laughed about it, but to me it was the saddest thing.
****
Ever since the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, George W. Bush has boasted of "liberating" Afghan women from the Taliban and the burqa. His wife Laura, after a publicity junket to Afghanistan in 2005, appeared on Jay Leno’s show to say that she hadn’t seen a single woman wearing a burqa.
But these are the sorts of wildly optimistic self-delusions that have made Bush notorious. His wife, whose visit to Afghanistan lasted almost six hours, spent much of that time at the American air base and none of it in the Afghan streets where most women, to this day, go about in big blue bags.
It’s true that after the fall of the Taliban lots of women in the capital went back to work in schools, hospitals, and government ministries, while others found better paying jobs with international humanitarian agencies. In 2005, thanks to a quota system imposed by the international community, women took 27% of the seats in the lower house of the new parliament, a greater percentage than women enjoy in most Western legislatures, including our own. Yet these hopeful developments are misleading.
Post-Taliban Afghanistan, under President Hamid Karzai, also ratified key international agreements on human rights: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Treaty of Civil and Political Rights, and CEDAW: the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Like the Constitution, these essential documents provide a foundation for realizing the human rights of women.
But building on that paper foundation -- amid poverty, illiteracy, misogyny, and ongoing warfare -- is something else again.
That’s why, for the great majority of Afghan women, life has scarcely changed at all. That’s why even an educated and informed leader like my colleague, on her way to a UN agency to work on women’s rights, is still unable to eat an ice cream cone.
****
For most Afghan women the burqa is the least of their problems.
Afghanistan is just about the poorest country in the world. Only Burkina Faso and Niger sometimes get worse ratings. After nearly three decades of warfare and another of drought, millions of Afghans are without safe water or sanitation or electricity, even in the capital city. Millions are without adequate food and nutrition. Millions have access only to the most rudimentary health care, or none at all.
Diseases such as TB and polio, long eradicated in most of the world, flourish here. They hit women and children hard. One in four children dies before the age of five, mostly from preventable illnesses such as cholera and diarrhea. Half of all women of childbearing age who die do so in childbirth, giving Afghanistan one of the highest maternal death rates in the world. Average life expectancy hovers around 42 years.
Notice that we’re still talking women’s rights here: the fundamental economic and social rights that belong to all human beings.
There are other grim statistics. About 85% of Afghan women are illiterate. About 95% are routinely subjected to violence in the home. And the home is where most Afghan women in rural areas, and many in cities, are still customarily confined. Public space and public life belong almost exclusively to men. President Karzai heads the country while his wife, a qualified gynecologist with needed skills, stays at home.
These facts are well known. During more than five years of Western occupation, they haven’t changed.
Afghan women and girls are, by custom and practice, the property of men. They may be traded and sold like any commodity. Although Afghan law sets the minimum marriageable age for girls at sixteen, girls as young as eight or nine are commonly sold into marriage. Women doctors in Kabul maternity hospitals describe terrible life-threatening "wedding night" injuries that husbands inflict on child brides. In the countryside, far from medical help, such girls die.
Under the tribal code of the Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group, men customarily hand over women and girls -- surplus sisters or widows, daughters or nieces -- to other men to make amends for some offense or to pay off some indebtedness, often to a drug lord. To Pashtuns the trade-off is a means of maintaining "justice" and social harmony, but international human rights observers define what happens to the women and girls used in such "conflict resolution" as "slavery."
Given the rigid confinement of women, a surprising number try to escape. But any woman on her own outside the home is assumed to be guilty of the crime of "zina" -- engaging in sexual activity. That’s why "running away" is itself a crime. One crime presupposes the other.
When she is caught, as most runaways are, she may be taken to jail for an indefinite term or returned to her husband or father or brothers who may then murder her to restore the family honor.
The same thing happens to a rape victim, force being no excuse for sexual contact -- unless she is married to the man who raped her. In that case, she can be raped as often as he likes.
In Kabul, where women and girls move about more freely, many are snatched by traffickers and sold into sexual slavery. The traffickers are seldom pursued or punished because once a girl is abducted she is as good as dead anyway, even to loving parents bound by the code of honor. The weeping mother of a kidnapped teenage girl once told me, "I pray she does not come back because my husband will have to kill her."
Many a girl kills herself. To escape beatings or sexual abuse or forced marriage. To escape prison or honor killing, if she’s been seduced or raped or falsely accused. To escape life, if she’s been forbidden to marry the man she would choose for herself.
Suicide also brings dishonor, so families cover it up. Only when city girls try to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire do their cases become known, for if they do not die at once, they may be taken to hospital. In 2003, scores of cases of self-immolation were reported in the city of Herat; the following year, as many were recorded in Kabul. Although such incidents are notoriously underreported, during the past year 150 cases were noted in western Afghanistan, 197 in Herat, and at least 34 in the south.
The customary codes and traditional practices that made life unbearable for these burned girls predate the Taliban, and they remain in force today, side by side with the new constitution and international documents that speak of women’s rights.
Tune in to a Kabul television station and you’ll see evidence that Afghan women are poised at a particularly schizophrenic moment in their history. Watching televised parliamentary sessions, you’ll see women who not only sit side by side with men -- a dangerous, generally forbidden proximity -- but actually rise to argue with them. Yet who can forget poor murdered Shaima, the lively, youthful presenter of a popular TV chat show for young people? Her father and brother killed her, or so men and women say approvingly, because they found her job shameful. Mullahs and public officials issue edicts from time to time condemning women on television, or television itself.
****
Many people believe the key to improving life for women, and all Afghans, is education, particularly because so many among Afghanistan’s educated elite left the country during its decades of wars. So the international community invests in education projects -- building schools, printing textbooks, teaching teachers, organizing literacy classes for women -- and the Bush administration in particular boasts that five million children now go to school.
But that’s fewer than half the kids of school age, and less than a third of the girls. The highest enrollments are in cities – 85% of children in Kabul -- while, in the Pashtun south, enrollments drop below 20% overall and near zero for girls. More than half the students enrolled in school live in Kabul and its environs, yet even there an estimated 60,000 children are not in school, but in the streets, working as vendors, trash-pickers, beggars, or thieves.
None of this is new. For a century, Afghan rulers -- from kings to communists -- have tried to unveil women and advance education. In the 1970s and 1980s, many women in the capital went about freely, without veils. They worked in offices, schools, hospitals. They went to university and became doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, engineers. They drove their own cars. They wore Western fashions and traveled abroad. But when Kabul’s communists called for universal education throughout the country, provincial conservatives opposed to educating women rebelled.
Afghan women of the Kabul elite haven’t yet caught up to where they were thirty-five years ago. But once again ultra-conservatives are up in arms. This time it’s the Taliban, back in force throughout the southern half of the country. Among their tactics: blowing up or burning schools (150 in 2005, 198 in 2006) and murdering teachers, especially women who teach girls. UNICEF estimates that in four southern provinces more than half the schools -- 380 out of 748 -- no longer provide any education at all. Last September the Taliban shot down the middle-aged woman who headed the provincial office for women’s affairs in Kandahar. A few brave colleagues went back to the office in body armor, knowing it would not save them. Now, in the southern provinces -- more than half the country -- women and girls stay home.
I blame George W. Bush, the "liberator" who looked the other way. In 2001, the United States military claimed responsibility for these provinces, the heart of Taliban country; but diverted to adventures in the oilfields of Iraq, it failed for five years to provide the security international humanitarians needed to do the promised work of reconstruction. Afghans grew discouraged. Last summer, when the U.S. handed the job to NATO, British and Canadian "peacekeepers" walked right into war with the resurgent Taliban. By year’s end, more than 4,000 Afghans were dead -- Taliban, "suspected" insurgents, and civilians. Speaking recently of dead women and children -- trapped between U.S. bombers and NATO troops on the one hand and Taliban forces backed (unofficially) by Pakistan on the other -- President Karzai began to weep.
It’s winter in Afghanistan now. No time to make war. But come spring, the Taliban promise a new offensive to throw out Karzai and foreign invaders. The British commander of NATO forces has already warned: "We could actually fail here."
He also advised a British reporter that Westerners shouldn’t even mention women’s rights when more important things are at stake. As if security is not a woman’s right. And peace.
Come spring, Afghan women could lose it all.
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