What's Up with The Democratic Congress

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What's Up with The Democratic Congress

By Jack A. Smith

Global Research, June 30, 2008

During the month of June the Democratic-controlled Congress in the U.S. voted to fund the Iraq war deep into next year, to support a compromise version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that endangers civil liberties, and, in effect, eliminated the possibility of impeaching President George W. Bush.

Why are progressives and the left not particularly surprised? Because it is consistent with the timidity, compromise, and opportunism that has come to characterize many of the actions and inactions of the Democratic Congress since it took power in January 2007. This is especially the case regarding the question of ending the Iraq War, the raison d'etre for its victory in the elections of November 2006.

We're not suggesting the Democrats are the same as the Republicans. Their centrism is an improvement over neoconservatism. But what consolation is that to liberal and antiwar voters when the Democrats just shoveled $162.5 billion into the furnace of war in Iraq and Afghanistan to last until August 2009 when Bush originally only sought $108 Billion to last until October? Or when the House has essentially legalized some the Bush Administration's domestic spying operations? Or when the Democrats voted "in favor" of liberal Rep. Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution by sending it to a Judiciary Committee that intends to bury it alive on instructions of the House majority leadership?

It seems to us that the Democratic Party's congressional leadership rather cavalierly decided to alienate its own rank-and-file constituency that wants the troops out of Iraq next year, that opposes the FISA legislation on civil liberties grounds, and that believes the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration deserve impeachment.

Fortunately for the party's politicians they will not suffer more than trace desertions by the faithful at the polls in November due to the cloak of immunity protecting them by virtue of being the "lesser evil." It's a powerful magnet, and rarely fails to pull in the disgruntled liberals and progressives. But even so, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn and Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel agreed on a rather deceptive approach to the war funding vote.

Rep. Pelosi and her colleagues worked out a way to split the funding bill into three separate sections to please the various Democratic House factions, but present the results to the Senate as a single proposal. This allowed the representative to be recorded as voting up or down on each measure. They were: (1) war funding, (2) a withdrawal provision, and (3) spending not related to Iraq and Afghanistan .

First it must be understood that the Democratic Party and Congressional leadership has no intention of halting war spending, particularly in an election year, but sought to convey the impression that it did in order to satisfy Democratic voters.

In this regard, President Bush earlier in the year presented a request for a supplemental appropriation of $108 billion through September. In discussions between the two parties, however, it was agreed to boost the war funding to $162.5 billion and extend the time until August 2009. The purpose was to achieve two objectives: (1) Eliminate having to vote on a new appropriation just weeks before Election Day. (2) Insure that the next president can wait until next summer before requesting more money for the wars.

The Democratic House leaders understood before the vote that the funding bill would pass since about a third of the Democratic members were going to vote in favor anyhow, and many more were prepared to vote "Yes" if their votes were absolutely necessary for passage. The money measure was approved June 19 with 268 votes in favor, including those of 80 Democrats, while 155 representatives, mostly from antiwar districts, voted against. Pelosi, from a strongly antiwar San Francisco district, voted "No," although the Democratic leadership has actually worked quietly to approve funding for the last 18 months. Hoyer, Clyburn and Emanuel voted "Yes."

Progressive Democrats such as Rep. Jim McGovern ( Mass. ) were angry about the funding verdict, knowing that their party could have fought much harder. "For me," he was quoted as saying by the New York Times June 20, "this is one compromise too many, one cave-in too many."

In justification, Pelosi complained that "The president simply will not sign such legislation. Our troops are in harm's way. They need to be taken care of." This has been the leadership's line from the beginning, ignoring the alternatives: Passing a limited money bill with a strong withdrawal proviso, or a bill with money specifically for bringing the troops home in three or six months ‹ and standing firm in the face of Bush vetoes, sending it back to him every time. He'd eventually have to relent or take the blame since the Democrats would be offering money to remove the troops from "harm's way," and he would be seen as rejecting it.

The second vote in the funding package was a proposal for removing all combat troops by December 2009, which passed 227-196. It was for show. The measure was non-binding, so it didn't amount to much more than allowing the Democrats to go on record favoring withdrawal even as they facilitated war funding. It was understood the this part of the funding package would be eliminated in the Senate.

The third vote was on domestic spending add-ons, primarily a popular measure updating the GI Bill to bill to provide free college education to enlistees who joined after the 9/11 terror attacks and remained at least three years. It passed 416-12 as both sides of the aisle competed to show how passionately they supported the troops. (See our editorial below, "Dying For An Education.")

The Senate passed the funding package June 26, minus the withdrawal proposal by vote of 92-6. All Democratic senators voted in favor. The "No" votes were from Republicans that objected to the domestic add-on spending.

The funding bill might have passed a month earlier but for a droll contretemps that took place on May 17, the day of the first vote. The Republicans were perturbed because the House majority leadership did not consult them when this complex three-part bill was put together, and also because they understood the real meaning of the bill was to approve the war money but to make it appear that the Democrats were mounting a serious opposition. Pelosi had 85 Democrats lined up to vote in favor, enough to pass the measure with the expected Republican votes.

But the GOP minority pulled a fast one. By last-minute prearrangement unknown to the Democrats, 132 Republicans didn't vote but answered "present," resulting in the defeat of the war funding bill 149-141. This pseudo "victory" for the antiwar side did not amuse the Democratic leadership. Hoyer accused the Republicans of not supporting the troops. Rahm told them, "Explain that to the troops." Pelosi took note that "House Republicans refused to pay for a war they support." GOP Minority Leader John Boehner commented: "It was a political scheme. We wanted to expose it, and we did."

On June 20, the House voted 293-129, with 105 Democrats joining the Republicans in supporting an updated "compromise" version of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was introduced 30 years ago to prevent the government's ongoing abuses of electronic surveillance allegedly intended to strengthen national security.

The compromise was the product of lengthy discussions between Democratic and Republican leaderships. The Democrats gave away so much that Republican chief negotiator Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri told the press: ³I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped to get."

The New York Times revealed two years ago that the Bush Administration had been engaged in violating the terms of the act starting after the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington. Bush then argued that the requirements of national security during the "War on Terrorism" provided him with the right to override aspects of the 1978 law. The compromise was intended to make improvements, but the new version of the act failed to close certain loopholes, let the White House off the hook, and provided no penalties for those who had violated the law.

In evaluating the updated proposal after its passage, the Times wrote that the compromise strengthened "the government¹s powers to spy on terrorism suspects in some major respectsŠ [and] would strengthen the ability of intelligence officials to eavesdrop on foreign targets. It would also allow them to conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined that important national security information would otherwise be lost. If approved by the Senate, as appears likely, the agreement would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years."

The bill also provided immunity to several telecommunications giants such as Verizon and AT&T, which cooperated with the government's illegal program. This means the dismissal of dozens of pending lawsuits against the companies for engaging in unlawful surveillance.

Civil libertarians and some Congressional Democrats were sharply critical of the compromise and House passage of the bill. New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee¹s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, charged that the bill ³abandons the Constitution¹s protections and insulates lawless behavior from legal scrutiny." Liberal Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold said the bill "is not a compromise; it is a capitulation."

A sense of the reactionary nature of this legislation was provided by Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Washington Legislative Office: This bill, she declared June 20, "is not a meaningful compromise, except of our constitutional rights. The bill allows for mass, untargeted and unwarranted surveillance of all communications coming in to and out of the United States . The courts¹ role is superficial at best, as the government can continue spying on our communications even after the FISA court has objected. Democratic leaders turned what should have been an easy FISA fix into the wholesale giveaway of our Fourth Amendment rights."

The party leadership, stung by the deluge of criticism, is evidently seeking to repair its reputation by promising to seek modifications in the Senate bill after the Independence Day holiday. They are also concerned about deflecting criticism from both left and right directed at Sen. Barack Obama, their presidential candidate. The left is aghast that Obama declared last week that he approved of the compromise, and the Republicans are mocking him for his "flip-flops," given that just a couple of months ago he sharply opposed granting immunity to the implicated telephone companies.

According to an article in the June 28 Chicago Tribune, Senate Democratic leader's are "giving the presidential candidate a chance to save face" by seeking to jettison "the lawsuit protection from the bill. While the amendment is expected to fail, it would allow Obama to vote against immunity and then vote later in favor of the FISA bill with the immunity provision intact."

The Tribune then quoted the ACLU's Fredrickson as saying, "Clearly there's that kind of maneuvering" going on, suggesting that a Senate amendment will "allow him [Obama] to vote, even if it's not in a meaningful way. Then he can claim he tried his best and move on."

The Democratic leadership has opposed impeaching President Bush ever since Speaker Pelosi announced two years ago that the issue has been taken "off the table," but Democratic voters and some liberal members of Congress have been agitating for the party to initiate impeachment proceedings. Their argument has two main points. (1) It's absolutely justified on the basis of the Bush Administration's known lies and illegal actions, particularly the unjust war in Iraq . (2) If Bush and his cohorts are allowed to escape the Constitutional remedy for "high crimes and misdemeanors," a dangerous precedent will be established for future administrations.

Rep. Kucinich, whose resolution now has five co-sponsors, has been arguing for impeachment for several years. On June 9 he spent hours reading the text of his entire bill in the House. He then introduced a motion with 35 Articles of Impeachment against President Bush. Each article is accompanied by a very brief description, such as Article I: "Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq ." There are also lengthy explanations and evidence. The full text is available in PDF format online. The first three pages of the 65-page document contain the brief descriptions. The rest is the text Kucinich read. It may be accessed at

http://chun.afterdowningstreet.org/amomentoftruth.pdf.

As soon as the impeachment resolution was submitted all Democratic members "supported" the measure by sending it to the House Judiciary Committee headed by Rep. John Conyers, who is expected to keep it bottled up indefinitely. The vote was 251-166, with 24 Republicans voting with the Democrats. Most of the Republicans who voted against the bill did so because they wanted an immediate debate and vote on its merits, knowing that the majority of Democrats, following their leadership, would vote against impeachment. This would have been a big embarrassment for the Democrats.

Kucinich himself voted to send the motion to committee, knowing that it had little chance of ever reaching the House floor for debate and a vote. He remained publicly optimistic, however, pledging to bring the matter up again with additional Articles of Impeachment. He can do this because impeachment is a privileged resolution under House rules, and if it is not voted on quickly, the motion can be reintroduced. "The leadership wants to bury it," the Ohio Congressman said, "but this is one resolution that will be coming back from the dead. Thirty days from now, if there is no action, I will be bringing the resolution up again, and I won't be the only one reading it."

The chances of obtaining and winning an impeachment vote seem impossible. But the occasion presents Kucinich with an opportunity to keep the issue before the public.

Jack A Smith is editor of the Activist Newsletter and a former editor of the Guardian ( US ) radical newsweekly. He may be reached at jacdon@earthlink.net

________________________________________

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). The Centre for Research on Globalization will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.

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© Copyright Jack A. Smith, Global Research, 2008

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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo

There are 204 days until Jan. 20, 2009.

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t r u t h o u t | 07.02

http://www.truthout.org/article/china-inspired-interrogations-guantanamo

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantanamo

Wednesday 02 July 2008

by: Scott Shane, The New York Times

Washington - The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of "coercive management techniques" for possible use on prisoners, including "sleep deprivation," "prolonged constraint," and "exposure."

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay , Cuba , and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret "alternative" interrogation methods.

Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed.

But committee investigators were not aware of the chart's source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been "brainwashed," and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies' harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured.

In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that "every American would be shocked" by the origin of the training document.

"What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions," Mr. Levin said. "People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don't need false intelligence."

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. "I can't speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations," Colonel Ryder said. "I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear - we treat all detainees humanely."

Mr. Biderman's 1957 article described "one form of torture" used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand "for exceedingly long periods," sometimes in conditions of "extreme cold." Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects.

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including "Semi-Starvation," "Exploitation of Wounds," and "Filthy, Infested Surroundings," and with their effects: "Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator," "Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist," and "Reduces Prisoner to 'Animal Level' Concerns."

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators "the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training."

The sessions included "an in-depth class on Biderman's Principles," the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman's 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as "Biderman's Chart of Coercion," have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo.

"It saddens me," said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called "thought reform" and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a "180-degree turn."

The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani's interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese.

Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani's treatment.

Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured.

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40 years later, nuclear states still haven't kept promises

www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.nukes01jul01,0,7582869.story

baltimoresun.com

40 years later, nuclear states still haven't kept promises

By Tad Daley

July 1, 2008

This year is full to bursting with remembrances of the many historic events that took place during the epochal year of 1968: The Tet offensive in Vietnam . The assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The melee at the Chicago Democratic Convention. And, on Christmas Eve, the flight of Apollo 8 from the Earth to the moon, bringing humanity its first glimpse of our single, borderless, breathtaking planet, lonely and fragile and whole, suspended among the blazing stars.

Yet the 1968 anniversary that we celebrate today may have consequences greater than any of these. Forty years ago today, in Washington , London and Moscow , world leaders signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The grand bargain of the NPT was that the non-nuclear weapon states agreed never to produce or acquire nuclear weapons, and the nuclear weapon states agreed eventually to get rid of theirs.

No, that is not a misprint. On July 1, 1968, our government committed itself to negotiate the elimination of its entire nuclear arsenal - and, with the other nuclear weapon states, to abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth forever.

Indeed, the nuclear weapon states have repeatedly restated their intention to fulfill that promise. The treaty entered into force in 1970. At the 25-year NPT Review Conference in 1995, the nations committed again "to systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons." At the 30-year NPT Review Conference in 2000, the commitment was reiterated. And the World Court concluded unanimously that the NPT had created "an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects."

And so the great issue facing the NPT regime today is how much longer the "have-nots" will keep their end of the bargain if the "haves" do not even move toward fulfilling theirs. The evidence of recent history - and common sense - is not promising.

The Bush administration has concentrated enormous diplomatic firepower on keeping North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, at the same time, the administration is proceeding to build something called a "reliable replacement warhead" that will eventually replace every nuclear warhead category in the U.S. arsenal. And during its first year in office, in its "Nuclear Posture Review," it set in motion plans to deploy a new long-range missile to deliver nuclear weapons in 2020, a new submarine to deliver nuclear weapons in 2030, and a new long-range heavy bomber to deliver nuclear weapons in 2040 - just in time for the 2045 centennial of the dawn of the atomic age.

We may, in the next decade or so, see the fulfillment of the NPT's grand bargain, and the elimination, at last, of every nuclear weapon from the face of the Earth. Alternatively, we may see the nuclear weapon states continue indefinitely to stall. If they do, several non-nuclear weapon states will almost certainly give up on the NPT bargain, and will set us on the road toward 10, 15 or 25 nuclear weapon states.

That will provide that many more opportunities for a nuclear warhead to find its way into the hands of a nonstate nuclear terrorist. Or for a hot political crisis between nuclear-armed adversaries to spin wildly out of control. Or for some rogue military officer to push the nuclear button out of malevolence or mental unbalance. Or for a nuclear warhead to be launched utterly by accident. (Astonishingly, experts believe this remains a real possibility, even for the United States or Russia ). Or ... well, name your own scenario for Armageddon.

The basic choice remains, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell put it in 1955, "stark and dreadful and inescapable" - a world with dozens of nuclear weapon states, or the alternative of a nuclear weapon-free world. A world with a few nuclear "haves" and a great many nuclear "have-nots" cannot forever endure.

Tad Daley is writing fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. His e-mail is onedaleyplanet@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center , 325 E. 25th St. , Baltimore , MD 21218 . Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Judges Cite Need for Reliable Evidence to Hold Detainees

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t r u t h o u t | 07.01

http://www.truthout.org/article/judges-cite-need-reliable-evidence-hold-detainees

Judges Cite Need for Reliable Evidence to Hold Detainees

Tuesday 01 July 2008

by: Del Quentin Wilber and Josh White, The Washington Post

In reversing a military tribunal's determination that a Chinese detainee was an "enemy combatant," a federal appeals court criticized the government's evidence and compared its legal theories to a nonsensical 19th-century poem.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit wrote in a 39-page opinion released yesterday that tribunals and courts must be able to assess whether evidence is reliable before determining the fate of detainees.

That did not happen in the case of Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese Uighur determined to be an enemy combatant by a tribunal that relied heavily on questionable evidence in classified documents, the appeals court found.

The ruling, the first successful appeal of a detainee's designation as an enemy combatant, ordered the government to release, transfer or hold a new hearing for Parhat. The opinion was issued on June 20 and was declassified and released yesterday.

The opinion could have broad implications for scores of other detainees classified as enemy combatants by Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The opinion is also likely to guide federal judges weighing evidence in up-coming hearings.

Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said in an e-mail yesterday that "we are evaluating our options." Parhat's lawyer, Susan Baker Manning, said the opinion shows that courts will not just accept "the government's say-so."

At issue was whether a military tribunal fairly weighed evidence that the government alleged linked Parhat to a group with purported ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Parhat, a member of the Muslim Uighur movement that is seeking a separate homeland in western China, left his country in May 2001 to avoid persecution, then lived in a camp in Afghanistan . After a U.S. airstrike, he and other Uighurs fled to Pakistan , where they eventually were handed over to U.S. authorities.

Parhat's tribunal determined that he had not engaged in hostilities against the United States or its allies. But it concluded that he was an enemy combatant because he lived at the Afghan camp, which was allegedly run by the leader of a group tied to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, according to the appellate opinion.

The tribunal reached that conclusion based on evidence in classified documents that "do not state (or, in most instances, even describe) the sources or rationales for those statements," the judges found.

The judges were particularly concerned with government assertions that the evidence was reliable because it was repeated in separate documents and that officials would not have included the information if it were not dependable.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true," wrote Judge Merrick B. Garland, quoting from Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark."

The panel, which included Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, also expressed skepticism about the evidence because the Chinese government may have supplied some of it.

"Parhat has made a credible argument that - at least for some of the assertions - the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs," Garland wrote.

--------

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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African Dictatorships and Double-Standards

Published on Tuesday, July 1, 2008 by Foreign Policy in Focus

African Dictatorships and Double-Standards

by Stephen Zunes

The Bush administration has justifiably criticized the Zimbabwean regime of liberator-turned-dictator Robert Mugabe. It has joined a unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning the campaign of violence unleashed upon pro-democracy activists and calling for increased diplomatic sanctions in the face of yet another sham election. In addition, both the House and the Senate have passed strongly worded resolutions of solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe in support of their struggle for freedom and democracy.

However, neither the Republican administration nor the Democratic-controlled Congress is sincerely concerned about human rights and democratic elections as a matter of principle. Rather, they are more likely acting out of political expediency. Despite claims of support for the advancement of democracy, the United States continues to support other African dictatorships that are as bad as or even worse than that of Zimbabwe .

Indeed, the United States currently provides economic aid and security assistance to such repressive African regimes as Swaziland , Congo , Cameroun , Togo , Chad , Cote d’Ivoire , Rwanda , Gabon , Egypt , and Tunisia . None of these countries holds free elections, and all have severely suppressed their political opposition.

The Worst Abuser

Among the worst of these African tyrannies has been the regime of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea . Obiang has been in power even longer than the 28-year reign of Mugabe and, according to a recent article in the British newspaper The Independent, makes the Zimbabwean dictator “seem stable and benign” by comparison. Obiang originally seized power in a 1979 coup by murdering his uncle, who had ruled the country since its independence from Spain in 1968. Under his rule, Equatorial Guinea nominally allowed the existence of opposition parties as a condition of receiving foreign aid in the early 1990s. But the four leading candidates withdrew from the last presidential election in December 2002 in protest of irregularities in the voting process and violence against their supporters. In that election, Obiang officially received more than 97% of the vote (down from 99.5% in the previous election.)

Though the U.S. State Department acknowledged that the election was “marred by extensive fraud and intimidation,” the Congress and the administration devoted none of the vehement condemnation that was so evident after the recent, similarly marred election process in Zimbabwe .

One major reason for the difference in response is oil. The development of vast oil reserves over the past decade has made Equatorial Guinea one of the wealthiest countries in Africa in terms of per capita gross domestic product. Virtually all of the oil revenues, however, goes to Obiang and his cronies. The dictator himself is worth an estimated $1 billion, making him the wealthiest leader in Africa; his real estate holdings include two mansions in Maryland just outside of Washington , DC . Meanwhile, the vast majority of the country’s population lives on only a few dollars a day, and nearly half of all children under five are malnourished. The country’s major towns and cities lack basic sanitation and potable water while conditions in the countryside are even worse.

During his most recent visit to Washington in 2006, Obiang was warmly received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who praised the dictator as “a good friend” of the United States . Not once during their joint appearance did she mention the words “human rights” or “democracy.” At the same press conference, Obiang praised his regime’s “extremely good relations with the United States ” and his expectation that “this relationship will continue to grow in friendship and cooperation.” None of the assembled reporters raised any questions about the regime’s notorious human rights record or its lack of democracy, instead using the opportunity to ask Secretary Rice questions about the alleged threat from Iran .
In 2002, the dictator met with President George W. Bush in New York to discuss military and energy security issues. He followed up in 2004 with meetings with then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.

Cozy Relations

Equatorial Guinea receives U.S. government funding and training through the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET). In addition, the private U.S. firm Military Professional Resources Incorporated - founded by former senior Pentagon officials who cite the regime’s friendliness to U.S. strategic and economic interests - plays a key role in the country’s internal security apparatus. Furthermore, as a result of Obiang’s understandable lack of trust in his own people, soldiers from Morocco - one of America’s closest African allies - have served for decades in a number of important security functions, including the role of presidential guards.

Maintaining close ties with such a notorious ruler has led even conservative Republicans like Frank Ruddy, who served as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, to denounce the Bush administration for being “big cheerleaders for the government - and it’s an awful government.”

Though the Chinese have also recently begun investing in the country’s oil sector, U.S. companies ExxonMobil, Amerada Hess, Chevron/Texaco, and Marathon Oil have played the most significant role. A report by the International Monetary Fund notes that U.S. oil companies receive “by far the most generous tax and profit-sharing provisions in the region.” Congressional hearings recently revealed how U.S. oil companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars destined to state treasuries directly into the dictator’s private bank accounts. A Senate report faulted U.S. oil companies for making “substantial payments to, or entering into business ventures with,” government officials and their family members.

The irony of the relative silence of Congress and the Bush administration regarding the human rights abuses and the undemocratic nature of Obiang’s regime is that, due to the critical role of U.S. economic investment and security assistance, the United States has far more leverage on the government of Equatorial Guinea than it does on the government of Zimbabwe. As a result, Americans can feel self-righteous in their condemnation of a regime in Zimbabwe with which the United States has little leverage while continuing to support an even more repressive regime over which the United States could successfully exert pressure if it chose to do so.

This does not mean the United States should have waited until it first ends its support of Obiang and other African dictatorships before joining the rest of the international community in condemning the repression in Zimbabwe . However, as long as the United States maintains such blatant double-standards, U.S. credibility as a defender of human rights and free elections is seriously compromised and thereby plays right into the hands of autocrats and demagogues like Robert Mugabe.

Stephen Zunes is a senior analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus and a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco .

Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center , 325 E. 25th St. , Baltimore , MD 21218 . Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Abu Ghraib Inmates Sue Contractors, Claim Torture

There are 205 days until Jan. 20, 2009.

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t r u t h o u t | 07.01

http://www.truthout.org/article/abu-ghraib-inmates-sue-contractors-claim-torture

Abu Ghraib Inmates Sue Contractors, Claim Torture

Tuesday 01 July 2008

by: David Dishneau, The Associated Press

Hagerstown , Maryland - Three Iraqis and a Jordanian filed federal lawsuits Monday alleging they were tortured by U.S. defense contractors while detained at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

The lawsuits allege that those arrested and taken to the prison were subjected to forced nudity, electrical shocks, mock executions and other inhumane treatment. They seek unspecified payments high enough to compensate the detainees for their injuries, and to deter contractors from such conduct in the future.

"These innocent men were senselessly tortured by U.S. companies that profited from their misery," said lead attorney Susan L. Burke, of the Philadelphia law firm Burke O'Neil. "These men came to U.S. courts because our laws, as they have for generations, allow their claims to be heard here."

Allegations of abuse at the Baghdad prison first erupted in 2004 with the release of pictures of grinning U.S. soldiers posing with detainees, some naked, being held on leashes or in painful and sexually humiliating positions. Eleven U.S. soldiers were convicted of breaking military laws, and five others were disciplined in the scandal.

Neither U.S. civilian nor military authorities have charged private contractors with crimes at Abu Ghraib.

The contractors named as defendants in the lawsuit are CACI International Inc. of Arlington , Va. , and New York-based L-3 Communications Corp., formerly Titan Corp.

Three of the complaints were filed in U.S. district courts in Seattle , Greenbelt , Md. , and Columbus , Ohio , jurisdictions where three former workers reside. The fourth was filed in Detroit , where L-3 recruited heavily for translators, according to that complaint.

The lawsuits repeat "baseless allegations" made more than four years ago in another case brought by the same lawyers, CACI spokeswoman Jody Brown said in a statement.

"In the years that have passed since these claims first surfaced, nothing has changed to give any merit to unfounded and unsubstantiated claims," the statement read. "These generic allegations of abuse, coupled with imaginary claims of conspiracy, remain unconnected to any CACI personnel."

L-3 didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Three of the lawsuits name individual employees of those companies as defendants. They are Adel L. Nakhla, a former L-3 translator, of Montgomery Village; Daniel "DJ" Johnson of Renton, Wash., who worked as a CACI interrogator, and Timothy L. Dugan of Pataskala, Ohio, who also worked as a CACI interrogator, according to the complaints.

Nakhla's wife, Nadine, told an Associated Press reporter on her doorstep that her husband wasn't home. She declined to say how he could be reached.

Johnson's lawyer, Patrick O'Donnell, said in an e-mail the allegations against his client are false. "Daniel Johnson went to Iraq as a 21-year-old, fresh out of the Army, in order to serve his country, which he did honorably," O'Donnell wrote.

Johnson didn't leave a forwarding address after he moved about 10 days ago, his landlord in Renton said.

A phone listing for Dugan went unanswered Monday.

Burke said all four plaintiffs were released from Abu Ghraib without charges after they were held for as long as four years and four months in the case of Dugan's accuser, Suhail Najim Abdullah Al Shimari, an Iraqi farmer.

Al Shimari claims he was subjected to electric shock, beaten, deprived of food and sleep, threatened with dogs, stripped naked, forcibly shaved and forced to watch Dugan and others choke another prisoner.

He claims Dugan, 48, beat an Iraqi civilian suspected of terrorism, threw him handcuffed and hooded from a vehicle, and dragged him across rocks.

Nakhla's accuser, Wissam Abdullateff Sa'eed Al-Quraishi, 37, of Amman, Jordan claims that Nakhla held Al-Quraishi down while a coconspirator poured feces on him.

Al-Quraishi also claims Nakhla and others stripped Al-Quraishi and other prisoners naked and piled them atop one another, separated by boxes.

Al-Quraishi also claims he watched Nakhla hold down a 14-year-old boy while an unidentified coconspirator sodomized the boy with a toothbrush.

Sa'adoon Ali Hameed Al-Ogaidi, a 36-year-old Arabic teacher from Baghdad, claims he was beaten by Johnson, threatened with execution and stripped naked and paraded before other prisoners.

Mohammed Abdwaihed Towfek Al-Taee of Baghdad claims an unidentified L-3 translator forced him to consume so much water that he vomited blood several times and then fainted. He claims the translator and others later tied a plastic line around his penis, preventing urination, and made him drink more, nearly killing him.

Burke and her associates filed a similar federal lawsuit in May in Los Angeles , claiming L-3 and CACI employees, including former CACI interrogator Steven Stefanowicz, abused an Abu Ghraib detainee named Emad al-Janabi.

All five cases stem from a District of Columbia federal judge's refusal to grant class-action certification to a 2004 lawsuit brought by the same attorneys and 237 plaintiffs. That complaint, which is still pending, consolidated two cases that originally named Stefanowicz, Nakhla, Dugan and Johnson. They were dismissed as defendants in the original cases for lack of jurisdiction.

Burke said more workers may be sued, and more plaintiffs may be added to the existing lawsuits.

Trying multiple cases has less potential impact than a class-action lawsuit, partly because individual plaintiffs have less clout, said Herman Schwartz, a law professor at American University in Washington . Also, individual plaintiffs may be inclined to settle for less money than a large group, he said.

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Associated Press writers Stephen Manning in Montgomery Village , Md. , and Dan Catchpole in Seattle contributed to this report.

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Report from El Salvador: Why They All Keep Coming clean up

By ALEXANDRA EARLY

June 30, 2008

http://www.counterpunch.org/early06302008.html

Having just spent time south of the border in a poor country whose major export is people, I've seen firsthand what's driving people north - and why conventional political solutions aren't going to deter desperate Salvadorans from coming to the U.S. Largely missing from this year's campaign is any serious reappraisal of our foreign, military, and trade policies that have forced millions Latin Americans to uproot themselves and seek opportunities for a better life far from home.

On the presidential campaign trail, even free trade critics provided little public education about the link between corporate globalization, trade deregulation, and the resulting forced relocation of people, in both hemispheres. For example, while courting blue-collar workers in farm states and the rust belt (often one and the same these days), Edwards frequently denounced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - and its new Central American counterpart, CAFTA - as "trade laws that send American jobs overseas". In Iowa , Michigan , and Ohio , free trade has fallen into disfavor because it threatens local manufacturing in rural communities already so economically depressed that some are becoming depopulated. As Lorri Brouer, a middle-aged Iowa Falls gift shop owner, asked a Boston Globe reporter in January: "Who's going to turn off the lights when we grow old and die, because all the young people are going away?"

In my recent travels in the Salvadoran countryside, I heard Lorri Brouer's fearful refrain echoed in many small villages (where the absence of people between the age of 25 and 55 is often quite noticeable). In one remote farming community in Usulutan, the remaining peasants were struggling to survive by grazing cattle and growing beans and corn amid cycles of flooding and drought. Most had settled in the region after being made refugees by El Salvador 's 12-year civil war. Some had served as combatants against the government forces, which received $4 billion in U.S. counterinsurgency aid during the 1980s. Because most residents still support the left, the right-wing Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) government of Antonio Elias Saca has failed to provide needed agricultural assistance and social services (which are made available to friendlier constituencies instead).

The mother and father in the large family I stayed with proudly showed me middle-school graduation photos of their two oldest children. But their pride was mixed with sadness and regret. Their son and daughter had both emigrated illegally to Houston after completing 9th grade, joining the 100,000 of their countrymen who flee every year. With few employment opportunities locally - and not many in the capital city of San Salvador either - the youth of the town "turn fourteen, and then they all leave", the woman explained. She pointed to the picture of her daughter smiling in her cap and gown: "When we talk on the phone, she says she misses us. She cries and says she doesn't like it there and wants to come home."

This forced displacement of people - a human tragedy on a massive scale - is at the heart of the trade agreements. Enacted fifteen years ago, NAFTA established a now familiar regional pattern. It has allowed U.S. grain companies "to dump cheap corn on the Mexican market, while at the same time Mexico was forced to cut its agricultural subsidies." Poor farmers in Oaxaca and Chiapas can no longer sell their crops at prices covering their production costs. So they've joined the stream of six million Mexicans seeking work here.

The Salvadoran economist Alfonso Goitia sees the same phenomenon occurring in El Salvador , where 40 per cent of the workforce is still employed in agriculture. Out of a total population of six million, 750,000 Salvadorans became political or economic exiles prior to the 1992 peace accords ending the civil war. Today, two million live in the U.S.A. because - under a series of ARENA governments over the last fifteen years - El Salvador has embraced free trade, adopted the dollar as its currency, privatized public services, ratified CAFTA, and consigned a large percentage of the population to continued poverty and exploitation.

In the countryside, small farmers can't maintain their own plots without government support or survive on the wages paid for day labor at larger farms. For those forced to seek work in urban areas, the choices aren't good either. In the manufacturing sector, jobs are concentrated in high-security export zone factories with low wages, sweatshop working conditions, and union-busting multinational employers. An effort last summer by SUTTELL, the telephone workers' union, to organize women assemblers at ABX Industries, an electronic component maker in San Bartolo, led to 30 of them being fired and then blacklisted, with the complicity of the Labor Ministry. As is often the case, the casualties of this campaign - when I met them in November - had been forced into the informal economy, joining the vast army of Salvadorans already peddling fruit, sneakers, toys, packaged snacks, and home-made food items at rickety roadside stands and in crowded central market places throughout the country.

One of the street vendors' biggest product lines - pirated CDs and DVDs - is now making them a special target of local police, trained by the U.S.-financed International Law Enforcement Academy in San Salvador. Where the U.S. once aided and abetted "death squads," it spends millions of aid dollars today orchestrating a crackdown on any would-be infringers on CAFTA-protected "intellectual property rights."

Not surprisingly - given such a problematic urban and rural "job market" - I would regularly see large crowds of people at the American Embassy in San Salvador, waiting for hours with their documents in hand, to apply for some form of legal entry into the U.S.A. A recent study by the University of Central America reported that 42 per cent of all Salvadorans still living in their own country would leave for the U.S. if given the chance. Whether you're approved or not, the nonrefundable fee for the personal interview required to get a U.S. visa is $65 - a hefty sum in a country where the monthly minimum wage is $157. The lines of hopeful people who snake around the high outside walls of the castlelike embassy complex are now enclosed in their own adjacent structure, a kind of immigration bus depot (with a very limited number of tickets available).

When legal entry into the U.S. is thwarted, Salvadorans who can afford to sell any land they own or take out personal loans hire a coyote who charges $4,000 to $6,000 for unofficial immigration assistance. With or without such a "professional" guide, migrants are vulnerable to assault, theft and rape along the long overland route through Guatemala and Mexico . In 2006, the Central American Resource Center documented hundreds of deaths and injuries among Salvadorans attempting to cross into the U.S. on foot. While U.S. newspapers report on local fears about Spanish-speaking invaders, the Salvadoran media regularly runs stories on children who disappear in the Arizona or Texas desert or young women who drown when their leaky boats capsize off the coast of Mexico . Meanwhile back home, family disintegration is a major Salvadoran social problem. Departing mothers and fathers leave their children in the hands of grandparents and other relatives; some kids grow up loosely supervised and feeling abandoned and end up contributing to the country's world-renowned "gang problem." Everyone's favorite local scapegoat, Salvadoran street gangs are indeed violent and a feeder system for a national prison system filled to twice its capacity. And legitimate popular concern about street crime - which has many urban residents afraid to walk outside after dark - is easily manipulated by the right, to further its own program of (civil liberties-infringing) domestic security measures.

Where President Bush and his ARENA allies are actually quite at odds is never publicly acknowledged. In Bush's rosy world view, loyal members of the "coalition of the willing" not only send troops to Iraq (as President Saca did) to bring the benefits of free markets to the Middle East; they also keep folks down on the farm at home - instead of coming to the U.S.--by exposing them to benefits of unfettered domestic capitalism. In reality, El Salvador is heavily dependent on remittances - the earnings of hundreds of thousands of its citizens working abroad. In 2006, Salvadorans sent home $3.3 billion - which equals about 18 per cent of the nation's GDP. These remittances keep the economy afloat and, by cushioning the impact of austerity policies imposed from abroad, operate as a huge social safety valve. With hard-earned dollars from the U.S. flowing to so many lower-income families and communities, there's far less pressure on the government to tax the rich or corporations to pay their fair share of the cost of schools, roads, solid waste disposal, health care, and other public services. In another town in Usulutan that I visited, a group of farmers proudly showed me the recently improved road connecting their fields to the closest markets; tired of waiting for public works assistance from the government, they had taken matters into their own hands and, with their own labor and funds - from children, siblings and others working in the U.S. - had done the necessary construction themselves.

Despite stepped up repression (in the form of new laws making various forms of political protest a potential "terrorist" act), Salvadoran social movements are also stirring. Their goal - and, hopefully, campaign platform, when the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) challenges ARENA in next year's presidential election - is to reclaim the idea of national economic development, fueled by much needed public investment. Last fall, thousands of banner-waving Salvadorans marched in the capital to "Defend the Right to Water" - in a major anti-privatization protest aimed at averting a threatened corporate takeover of the country's ailing public water system. On their heads, demonstrators balanced the colorful plastic containers that women and children use to carry water on their long walks to and from wells, springs, and pumps in rural areas. Local speakers were joined by several North American visitors, including former U.S. Ambassador Robert White and Maryland legislator Ana Sol Gutierrez, who joined the call for expanded access to potable water.

Unfortunately, only a handful of North Americans currently share their understanding that publicly funded job creation, agricultural assistance, workers' rights, decent roads and schools, and other basic services are exactly what's needed to keep far more Salvadorans in El Salvador , where most would much prefer to be.

Alexandra Early is a recent graduate of Wesleyan University in Latin American Studies who worked in El Salvador for CRISPAZ, a cross-border solidarity and social justice group. She can be reached at earlyave@gmail.com. For more information on CRISPAZ, see www.crispaz.org.

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St. , Baltimore , MD 21218 . Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs