Pakistan denies al-Qaida targeting nuclear facilities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/12/pakistan-nuclear-al-qaida

 

Pakistan denies al-Qaida targeting nuclear facilities

British academic claims nuclear infrastructure targeted three times in two years, but Pakistan says targets were military

 

• Declan Walsh in Islamabad

• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 12 August 2009 16.49 BST

 

Pakistan's military has strenuously rejected allegations by a British academic that al-Qaida is targeting the country's nuclear facilities in an attempt to obtain weapons for use against the west.

In an article for a US military journal, Professor Shaun Gregory, of the University of Bradford, said al-Qaida and the Taliban had targeted the country's nuclear infrastructure three times in the last two years.

 

Gregory cited suicide attacks on a "nuclear missile site", a "nuclear airbase" and a munitions complex at Wah, close to Islamabad, described as "one of Pakistan's main nuclear weapons assembly sites".

"The risk of the transfer of nuclear weapons, weapons components or nuclear expertise to terrorists in Pakistan is genuine," he wrote.

 

A military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said Gregory's claims were "factually incorrect" and part of a western propaganda campaign to "malign Pakistan and its nuclear facilities".

 

The bases at Wah, Sargodha and Kamra were used to manufacture conventional weapons, ammunition and fighters jet, he said. "There are military facilities, not nuclear installations."

 

The suicide attacks were widely reported when they occurred and generally were not linked to Pakistan's secretive nuclear programme, which has an estimated 60 to 100 warheads.

 

Gregory cited a US website, the Long War Journal, as the source for his claims, the most contentious of which surrounds the Wah complex. When it was bombed in August 2008, a Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility, saying it was retaliation for army-inflicted civilian deaths in the tribal belt.

Talat Masood, a retired general and political analyst who ran the factory for eight years in the 1980s, said the nuclear link was "absolute nonsense".

 

The only known overt Taliban strike against Pakistan's nuclear infrastructure occurred last month, when a motorcycle-riding suicide bomber hit a bus carrying employees of Kahuta Research Laboratories, a major uranium enrichment facility, as it passed through Rawalpindi. Up to six people were killed.

 

Pakistan's nuclear programme is a source of both immense national pride and sensitivity. According to a popular conspiracy theory, the US is fomenting the Taliban insurgency to create an excuse for American troops to disarm the warheads.

 

In recent years as the country plunged into turmoil, the Pakistani military has reached out to stress the security of its atomic assets. The Strategic Plans Division, which oversees nuclear operations, regularly briefs visiting diplomats and journalists about safeguards it describes as world-class.

One element is the personnel reliability programme, modelled on a similar US initiative, which regularly screens nuclear workers for "Islamist sympathies, personality problems, drug use, inappropriate external affiliations, and sexual deviancy," according to Gregory. The army has jealously resisted US efforts to assert control over its security measures.

 

Meanwhile, reports emerged that at least 70 people have been killed in fighting between tribal factions in the wake of Baitullah Mehsud's apparent assassination a week ago.

 

The clashes occurred in Jandola, a town on the edge of South Wazisitan, between forces loyal to Mehsud and the pro-government tribal leader Turkistan Bhittani. Mehsud is thought to have died in a US drone strike on 5 August. Taliban commanders insist he survived but have produced no proof to back their claim.

 

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk at 16.49 BST on Wednesday 12 August 2009. It was last updated at 16.49 BST on Wednesday 12 August 2009.

 

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

 

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

 

Oct. 5 at the White House/White House Fears Liberal War Pressure

Join us on Mon., Oct. 5 at the White House.  The National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance is organizing direct action to condemn the warmongering in Afghanistan. Email Max at mobuszewski at verizon.net or call 410-366-1637.     

 

Published on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 by Politico.com

White House Fears Liberal War Pressure

by Mike Allen

White House officials are increasingly worried liberal, anti-war Democrats will demand a premature end to the Afghanistan war before President Barack Obama can show signs of progress in the eight-year conflict, according to senior administration sources.

These fears, which the officials have discussed on the condition of anonymity over the past few weeks, are rising fast after U.S. casualties hit record levels in July and August.

The aides also expressed concern that Afghan election returns, still being tallied, will result in a narrow reelection for President Hamid Karzai that could result in qualms about his legitimacy — “Tehran II,” as one official put it, in reference to the disputed Iranian election.

The result: some think Afghanistan - not health care - will be the issue that defines the early years of the Obama administration.

“There’s no question that the drumbeat is going to get louder and louder on the left, and you’ll see some fall-off on the right,” said Matt Bennett of the think tank Third Way, the moderate voice of the progressive movement. “His supporters on the Hill are fighting a really serious political battle to keep the criticism under control.”

The Afghanistan conflict, which has gotten relatively little attention in part because Obama talks far more often about domestic concerns, is roaring back to the top of the Obama agenda as Congress is about to return from weeks of meetings with often unhappy voters.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) last week called for a timetable to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan — the same tactic he and other war opponents used to build congressional support for forcing an end to the Iraq war.

But Obama officials — including National Security Adviser James Jones and Defense Secretary Robert Gates — know the problem is much bigger than Feingold and timetables. They anticipate a growing number of anti-war liberals will call, with increasing force, for an end to the conflict when lawmakers return. Cost could become an issue, too. With deficits high, there will be heavy pressure on Obama to find savings somewhere in 2010 — and war critics see Afghanistan as a good place to start.

George F. Will opened a new fissure among conservatives with a column Tuesday calling for the U.S. to pull all ground troops out of Afghanistan, on the theory on the French general Charles de Gaulle that genius “sometimes consists of knowing when to stop.”

But it’s Democratic opposition that could force Obama to retreat on what he has called a "war of necessity."

To try to salve critics, the administration has been developing a series of numerical indicators, scheduled to be sent to Capitol Hill by Sept. 24, that are designed to sharpen U.S. goals by measuring everything from civilian deployments to the proportion of the Afghan population that is secured.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told POLITICO: “We have to show the American people that all this effort, all these resources, all these lives are making a difference.”

White House officials expect that a whole new national conversation about what the U.S. is doing in Afghanistan, and how, will be prompted by recommendations for strategy adjustments that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, made in an assessment of the war that went to the Pentagon on Monday and is likely to be delivered to the White House in the next week.

McChrystal held off from requesting additional troops in the assessment, but administration officials expect he will ask for at least 10,000 more soldiers and Marines later this fall, on top of the 20,000 additional troops Obama authorized in February and March.

“Our point here is: Let’s see what’s working, and what’s not, and base it on the facts, not a gut instinct that most commanders have, that more is better,” a senior administration official said. “We’re prepared to shift and adjust, depending on what we see work. We need to let this strategy take hold, and see what we’re doing well, and if there are deficiencies, before coming in with any requests for additional resources.”

Nevertheless, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said at Monday’s briefing: “I think there's broad agreement that for many years our effort in Afghanistan has been under-resourced politically, militarily, economically.”

Liberal House members have already made it clear they will balk at future funding requests, but now the administration is trying to make sure that leaders and key committee chairmen don’t also lose their stomach for the conflict after two months in a row of record U.S. casualties since the 2001 invasion.

“It doesn’t need to be victory in 12 months to 18 months -- that’s not realistic,” a top administration official said. “But the American people needed to have a sense that we are moving in the right direction. We need to bring about noticeable change on the ground. We have to start to show progress.”

Bennett, of Third Way, said Americans need to recognize that the situation Obama inherited in Afghanistan “is as bad as the economy was -- heading off the rails in just as dramatic a way.”

“In both cases, the president took a bunch of action very quickly to get back on track, and it will take time to show benefits,” Bennett said.

But unlike with the economy, there are few signs of “green shoots” in Afghanistan.

In August, U.S. deaths in Afghanistan passed 50 for the first month since the 2001 invasion, adding to administration worries about keeping key lawmakers on board. A senior official said the White House always “knew it was going to get worse before it got better.”

“These casualties, as gut-wrenching as they are, are not a surprise to anyone,” the official said.

“When you put in 20,000 additional forces and you deploy them to regions of the country that had been untouched by coalition forces for a long time -- had been basically ceded to the Taliban -- it’s not at all unexpected that that would then result in difficult confrontations, and American and coalition lives lost. But, ultimately, by going after the Taliban in these strongholds, it’ll turn the tide in those areas.”

© 2009 Capitol News Company LLC

 

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

 

Explaining foreign health systems

Explaining foreign health systems

 

Campaign Desk -- August 28, 2009

Laurel to T.R.Reid

 

For extraordinary clarity in explaining foreign health systems

 

By Trudy Lieberman

 

http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/laurel_to_tr_reid.php?page=all

 

As I have posted many times on Campaign Desk, the

media, for the most part, has hardly touched how health

care works in the rest of the developed world. Special

interests, instead, have filled in the blanks with

shrill and false advertising about socialized medicine

and rationing. The public discussion has become so

polarized and virulently nasty that it's nearly

impossible for any lessons from abroad to gain traction.

 

In last Sunday's Washington Post, T.R. Reid, a former

Post reporter and would-have-been host of Frontline's

"Sick Around America" last March, busts five myths

about foreign health care, in an article based on

reporting for his new book, The Healing of America: a

Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health

Care. What's remarkable about this piece is not that he

challenges commonly held beliefs about how bad things

are in England or Germany (other groups have tried to

do that), but that he does it with clarity, simplicity,

and honesty--three attributes that have been missing

from much of this year's health care reportage.

 

Myth one: It's all socialized medicine out there. No,

says Reid. Some countries, like Britain and Cuba,

provide health care in government hospitals with the

government paying the bills. But in other countries,

like Canada, private-sector providers give the care

that is paid for under their national health systems.

"In some ways, health care is less socialized overseas

than in the United States," he writes.

 

Myth two: Overseas care is rationed through limited

choices or long lines. Generally not, Reid points out.

In most places, patients can go to any doctor or have

choices of providers. There are no limits like we have

in the U.S.--no lists of in-network doctors and

pre-authorization forms. In Canada, he acknowledges,

some people wait for non-emergency care, but Britain,

Germany, and Austria outperform the U.S. when it comes

to waiting times for appointments and elective

surgeries. Waiting times are so short in Japan, most

people don't bother making appointments. I know from my

own reporting in Japan that people simply walk into any

hospital, and pronto, they are seen.

 

Myth three: Foreign-health care systems are

inefficient, bloated bureaucracies. All other payment

systems are more efficient than ours, Reid writes. U.S.

health insurers have the highest administrative costs

in the world, spending about twenty cents of every

dollar for paperwork, marketing, and claims review.

Japan controls costs better than any other country,

even though its population uses more services than

Americans use. Quality is high, and life expectancy and

recovery rates for major illnesses are better than in the U.S.

 

Myth four: Cost controls stifle innovation. That

assertion is just plain false, Reid says. While

groundbreaking research comes from the U.S., it also

comes from other countries with much lower cost

structures--like France, where hip and knee replacements

were invented, or Canada, where the breakthrough in

deep-brain stimulation to treat depression was made.

 

Myth five: Health insurance has to be cruel. In

America, insurance companies routinely reject

applicants with preexisting medical conditions, and

rescind policies of those who accumulate big medical

bills. That doesn't happen in other countries, where

all the national insurance schemes must accept everyone

and pay all the bills that citizens present. Reid

observes that the key difference between the U.S. and

other systems is that foreign health plans exist only

to pay medical bills; they aren't in business to make a profit.

 

The most persistent myth of all, says Reid, is that

"America has the finest health care in the world. We

don't." When you compare results, most other

industrialized countries have much better statistics.

For awhile at the beginning of the presidential

campaign, advocacy groups and politicians talked about

the under-performing U.S. health care system. But that

was before Celinda Lake advised Democrats not to

mention statistics like how America ranks

thirty-seventh in the world in health outcomes. When

spokespeople and politicans stopped talking about

America's bad showing, so did the media.

 

Reid reminds us why we need to keep reminding audiences

how and why America falls short, and he offers a fine

template for reporters needing help breaking down

health bill complexities, misinformation, and the

half-truths that will keep floating around. We urge

readers of Campaign Desk who are not journalism

professionals to see what Reid has to say. Apparently

Post readers are already doing that: Post ombudsman

Andy Alexander told me that Reid's story was the most

widely viewed story on the paper's Web site Sunday and Monday.

 

_____________________________________________

 

Art Milholland in hospital/Why Israeli Jew Uri Davis Joined Fatah to Save Palestine

Friends,

 

A stalwart in the peace movement, Dr. Art Milholland, was admitted to the University of Maryland Hospital on Saturday, August 29 with a "lower brain stem stroke" or "cerebral accident."  He will remain there until at least Wednesday, and his wife Luanne, another active member of Maryland’s peace and justice movement, has been by his side.

 

Members of the Jonah House have visited Art, and he is staying strong despite being fed through the nose.  Let me know if you are interested in visiting with him.  If you do not know Art, please send good vibrations his way.

 

Kagiso,

 

Max

 

Why Israeli Jew Uri Davis Joined Fatah to Save Palestine

 

    The first Jewish member of the Revolutionary Council of Fatah talks about a unique political journey

 

By Peter Beaumont

The Observer (UK)

August 23, 2009

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/23/uri-davis-interview-israel-fatah-palestine

 

Uri Davis is used to denunciations. A "traitor", "scum",

"mentally unstable": those are just some of the

condemnations that have been posted in the Israeli

blogosphere in recent days. As the first person of

Jewish origin to be elected to the Revolutionary Council

of the Palestinian Fatah movement, an organisation once

dominated by Yasser Arafat, Davis has tapped a deep

reserve of Israeli resentment. Some have even called for

him to be deported.

 

He has been here before, not least as the man who first

proposed the critique of Israel as an "apartheid state"

in the late 1980s. Davis's involvement in the first UN

World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 was

condemned by the Anti-Defamation League. During a career

of protest he has been described - inevitably - as a

"self-hating Jew". He calls himself an "anti-Zionist".

And his personal history is a fascinating testimony to

the troubled history of the postwar Israeli left and

forgotten trajectories in the story of Israel itself.

 

The man elected to the Revolutionary Council in 31st

place from a field of 600 has been as much shaped by the

tidal forces of recent Jewish history - not least his

own family's sufferings in the Holocaust - as any fellow

citizen of Israel. But he disputes a largely

manufactured account of that experience that he believes

has been used deliberately "to camouflage" its

"apartheid programme". Now he enjoys an extraordinary

mandate to explain his own views. And he hopes, too,

that just as the small number of white members of the

ANC widened its legitimacy during the apartheid era in

South Africa, other Jews can be attracted to participate

in Fatah, transforming it into a broader-based movement

that stands for equal rights for both Arabs and Jews in

a federated state.

 

So what does Davis believe, and  why? His father was a

British Jew who met his mother, a Czech, in British

Mandatory Palestine in the mid-1930s, where they married

in 1939, four years before his birth. While his mother

escaped the transports to the gas chambers at Auschwitz,

many in her family did not. It is a familiar story in

Israel. But the lesson that Davis learnt from it was

different from the vast majority of Jews who concluded

that never again could Jews depend on others to

guarantee their security from persecution.

 

"An important part of the education that I received from

my parents," Davis recalled last week, "was never to

generalise. To beware of every sentence that begins with

'all'. It was not 'all' Germans who killed my mother's

family. It was some Nazis." Another distinction was

emphasised by his mother. "If she heard the suggestion

of vengeance, she would be horrified. She sought

justice. One of the biggest problems addressing a

Zionist audience is that the distinction between justice

and vengeance has collapsed."

 

He is 66 now, but that warning from his parents on the

risk of demonising the Other still resonates in Davis's

language. He is insistent that generalities should be

avoided, not least the "normative idea all Israelis are

exposed to: that all Arabs hate the Jews and all Arabs

want to drive the Jews into the sea".

 

His own self-description is a case in point, fine-tuned

over the decades. "It has gone through a number of

stages. In my autobiography in the mid-1990s I described

myself as a Palestinian Jew. That has now changed to a

Palestinian Hebrew of Jewish origins." How he frames his

own identity is part of his attempt to impose an

"alternative narrative" to the one that has dominated

Israel since its foundation in 1948 by what he describes

as "a settler-colonialist" strand of Zionism built on a

massive act of "ethnic cleansing". That moment - known

as the "Nakba", or the catastrophe to Arabs - saw the

flight of 650,000-750,000 Palestinians who fled or were

expelled from their homes by Jewish forces.

 

Davis is careful with his definitions of both "Zionism"

and his own "anti-Zionism". The Zionism that he opposes

is the "political Zionism" of Israel's founders, the

Zionism that amounts, he says, to land grab based on

ethnic cleansing.

 

Davis himself insists on reclaiming a wider meaning for

the word, not least because he was shaped, as he grew

up, by a different school: the "spiritual Zionism" of

thinkers such as Ahad Ha'am, religious philosopher

Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, co-founder of Jerusalem's

Hebrew University.

 

In contrast to political Zionism, which saw Jewish

statehood alone as a solution to the Jewish question,

these spiritual Zionists believed Palestine could not

accommodate a Jewish homeland but should become a

national spiritual centre that would support and

reinvigorate the Jewish diaspora.

 

Davis has written how his own "intellectual and moral

development was profoundly influenced by Buber's

writings" although he has fiercely condemned Buber's

later actions, not least Buber's appropriation of a

house in Jerusalem belonging to the family of the late

Palestinian activist and writer Edward Said.

 

Then there was Leon Roth, one of his father's relatives

and a fellow professor of Buber at the new Hebrew

University. Roth resigned his post after witnessing the

treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in the creation of

Israel and returned to Cambridge.

 

But if these were formative influences on Davis, it is

how he interpreted what he saw growing up in the young

state of Israel that marked him out as different.

Reading Gandhi and Martin Luther King led him to a

pacifist position that saw him refuse military service

in the 1960s, at a time when it was almost unheard of.

He was eventually assigned to "alternative" service

working on a kibbutz on the border with the Gaza Strip.

 

"I refused to participate in the armed patrols of the

kibbutz fence on the border and that led to daily

shouting matches. Then one of the members took me to the

periphery of the kibbutz where there was a cluster of

eucalyptus trees. He said: 'What can you see?' And I

said trees. Then he took me into the wood and showed me

a pile of stones. He asked me what I could see and I

said: 'A pile of stones.' He said: 'No. This is the

[Arab] village of Dirma. Its residents are refugees

while we cultivate their land. Now do you understand why

they hate us and want to drive us into the sea?

 

"And I said, 'But there is an alternative. We could

invite them back and share it with them.'" He pauses.

"If looks could kill. I saw that he saw me as a hopeless

case. And I'm proud to say I'm still that hopeless case."

 

Davis experienced a second moment of epiphany decades

later during the first Gulf war, when Iraq was firing

Scud missiles at Israel - a moment of insight related to

an unresolved question from his childhood. "I was born

in Jerusalem, but I grew up on a farm near Herziliya. I

would walk with my peers down to the beach and pass the

ruins of an Arab village under the shadow of a mosque

that was still intact. And the dominant narrative

deleted the reality. The elders of my community said

they had pleaded with the elders of the Arab village to

stay. And the elders of the Arab village refused. I had

no way to challenge this for decades.

 

"During the first Gulf war the penny dropped. The mayor

of Tel Aviv was abusing all those residents who had fled

under the threat from Scuds. After the war ended, the

families returned. They used their keys. Put their cash

cards in the ATMs. Re-opened their shops. What was

significant was that no one said to them: anyone who has

left has lost their property rights. That was my second crossroads."

 

Davis published Israel: An Apartheid State in 1987. He

distinguishes between racism and apartheid, which, he

argues, requires not simply an official value system

that distinguishes on a racial basis but a legal

reality. Indeed, Davis has written that it is wrong to

single out Israel on the grounds that it is more racist

than other states in the UN. Rather he believes it

should be singled out because, as he wrote in a letter

to Al-Ahram newspaper in 2003, "it applies the force of

law to compel its citizens to make racial choices, first

and foremost in all matters pertaining to access to

land, housing and freedom of residence".

 

Davis's lifetime of dissent has not been without

consequences. After joining Fatah, Davis began a long

period of "de facto exile" at the suggestion of his

lawyer to avoid a show trial. He taught during that time

at a number of British universities, including Bradford, Exeter and Durham.

 

Returning to Israel and the Occupied Territories in the

mid-1990s, following the Oslo Accords, Davis struggled

for years to secure an appointment at an Israeli

academic institution. " I kept my affiliation with

Exeter and Durham, which helped me with periodical

research that they farmed out to me. I also had an

inheritance." It was only recently that he was appointed

to teach a course at the Palestinian Al-Quds university

on critical Israeli studies.

 

His marriage in 2008 to a Palestinian woman has not made

life easier for him. She has been denied a permit to

live in Israel, while Davis is forbidden by Israeli law

to live in an area under Palestinian authority control

as an Israeli citizen. In consequence, he is vague both

about the circumstances of his conversion to Islam

shortly before the wedding and where he now lives,

describing those arrangements as "private".

 

What does he hope to achieve as a Palestinian Hebrew who

is a full member of the Revolutionary Council?

 

His core message, he explains, is "to suggest" to his

new colleagues that there is nothing to fear in

recognising the notion of a Jewish state. "The correct

response is that we will not recognise an Israel defined

by political Zionism." And perhaps just as importantly,

Davis believes that Fatah can expand its role from

representing only Palestinian Arabs to representing all

of those who oppose "settler-colonialism".

 

"It cannot win the struggle for equality that it has

waged for so long as long as it remains only

representative of Palestinians. To win the moral [high

ground] it has to project itself as a democratic

alternative for all. That is the message I first

delivered and that I have persevered with and has led to

my election to the Revolutionary Council after 25

years." It seems unlikely that condemnations on Israeli

websites will prevent Uri Davis from giving up on his

unique mission now.

 

_____________________________________________