Month: October 2011

At CNN.com, Jennifer Fenton interviews a former guard at Guantanamo Bay detention center. He tells a number of anecdotes of abuse, here is one:

The IRF team opened the cell door and the one team member carrying a riot shield threw it off to the side. “And whatever little speed he could gather from that short distance he jumped up in the air and came down with his knee right in the middle of the back of [the detainee] and landed right on top of him.”

The other four men started punching the detainee. “Then someone on the inside called the female MP… in there to hit him. And she did,” Neely said.

When it was all over the detainee was in a pool of blood unconscious, according to Neely. The detainee was taken by ambulance to the main hospital in Guantanamo. The detainee was later released from Guantanamo Bay without charge, Neely said.

Like so many of the 750 total detainees at Gitmo, this poor guy was released when they realized they had insufficient evidence of his guilt. Documents about detainees, as the ACLU blog talks about here, showed many were held for “dubious” reasons. But let us not forget, Obama is continuing to deprive detainees of habeaus corpus rights. Just this month, Gitmo detainee Abdul Qader Ahmed Hussein and Karim Bostan were told they will not get a fair trial and the government will not be required to present evidence of their guilt in a court. This of course comes with the news that the Obama administration had full knowledge of the torture and abuse of detainees in US-supported Afghan prisons long before the UN report condemning it was released to the public. That report found that prisoners are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness, among other abuse. Not a problem for President Barack “Looking-Forward-Not-Backward” Obama.

See here and here for related posts.

Paul Wolfowitz and Michael O’Hanlon write in Foreign Policy that the Obama administration should apply “the Colombia model” to the strategy in Afghanistan in order to be “successful.” The US’s well known Plan Colombia policy, they write, “is rightly considered a substantial victory” and “strange though it may sound, success in Afghanistan would look a lot more like the success that has been achieved in Colombia over the last 10 years.” The problem is that US policy towards Colombia has only been a success if you think widespread corruption and ongoing violence by narco-terrorists and right-wing paramilitaries qualifies as a “success.” And only a scoundrel like Wolfowitz would condemn Afghanistan to the same US-imposed fate.

Plan Colombia, of course, is the US plan to concentrate military and counter-narcotics cooperation and aid to Colombia under the pretext of fighting the Drug War and left-wing guerrilla groups (like FARC), even if it means supporting equally vicious right-wing terrorists and perpetuating problems with the drug trade. I wrote extensively about it here. But Wolfowitz gives his version of the background:

For almost 50 years, Colombia has been plagued by violence, the result of a bloody war waged against the government by Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries — led primarily by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Although the violence was interrupted from time-to-time by a variety of peace agreements, these inevitably turned out to be more in the nature of armed truces than true peace settlements. Violent right-wing militias and even more violent narco-traffickers, added to the bloodshed. The narcotics trade itself became a major source of funding for FARC and, as the cocaine and heroin trade grew in the 1990s, the government’s grip on the country became increasingly tenuous. Assassinations became commonplace and violent deaths were, based on the best available statistics, at least five times higher in per capita terms than the level in Afghanistan today. In fact, war-related deaths remain higher in Colombia even now, after a decade of progress. By 1998, a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report speculated on the possibility of a FARC victory within as little as five years. At the height of the insurgency in 2006, the FARC controlled as much as 30 percent of the territory of Colombia.

Notice how the culpability for “violent right-wing militias and even more violent narco-traffickers” and for the narcotics trade becoming “a major source of funding for FARC” is erased from Wolfowitz’s account. More accurately, the United States has been funding the violent right-wing militias as they terrorize the population. More accurately still, America’s drug war and ridiculous prohibitions are precisely what provided the lucrative black market for FARC militias to thrive off and contributed to pre-Plan Colombia horrors there as well as the ongoing problems.

As evidence for the success in Colombia, he quotes a recent Congressional Research Service report as saying the US in Colombia “made significant progress in reestablishing government control over much of its territory, combating drug trafficking and terrorist activities, and reducing poverty.” Sure, but that CRS report gave that quote essentially in passing, as it went on to chronicle the horrible human rights situation there that has largely been worsening due to Wolfowitz’s acclaimed Plan Colombia.

The report intricately details US support for what has come to be known as the para-political scandal, in which elite members of the Colombian government have colluded with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group which is responsible for killing tens of thousands of Colombian civilians, and controls over 75% of the Colombian cocaine trade. Virtually the entire government had ties to these US-supported terrorist groups, and many powerful elements within the government attempted to obstruct the criminal investigations addressing those ties. These paramilitary groups “regularly commit massacres, killings, forced displacement, rape, and extortion, and create a threatening atmosphere in the communities they control” often targeting “human rights defenders, trade unionists, victims of the paramilitaries who are seeking justice, and community members who do not follow their orders.” Seventeen massacres, “resulting in 76 deaths, were reported between January and May,” according to Human Rights Watch. “Successor groups,” said the report, “contributed to a 34 percent increase in massacres in 2010, the highest annual total since 2005.”

Aside from the right-wing paramilitaries, the US also supports the Colombian police and army who also engage in atrocities. This is also left out of Wolfowitz’s rosy version. The police are basically local bullies who regularly threaten the people, but even worse is the military which, due to an army policy which rewarded high body counts of leftist guerrillas, engaged in systematic massacres of Colombian civilians, dressing their dead bodies in the garb of the guerrilla fighters in order to inflate military body counts. These have been referred to as “false positive” killings. The Prosecutor General’s human right’s team investigated “more than 1,200 cases of extrajudicial executions,” prompting the then-UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to write in 2009 that “the sheer number of cases, their geographic spread, and the diversity of military units implicated, indicate that these killings were carried out in a more or less systematic fashion by significant elements within the military” (CRS report, p 18-19).

Describing the success, Wolfowitz explains these victorious milestones have been achieved “through a combination of brave actions by the Colombian military, some $7 billion in U.S. assistance, a relatively small number of U.S. military advisors and, particularly, the strong leadership of President Alvaro Uribe from 2002 to 2010.” Yes, murdering innocents all throughout the country are brave actions indeed. But let’s think about what kind of government the $7 billion in assistance and Uribe’s leadership has given the Colombian people. Uribe is extremely corrupt and has widely been described as having authoritarian tendencies. Not only did he oversee the para-political scandals and the false positive massacres, but his administration also engaged in crackdowns on freedom of the press and a nation-wide warrantless surveillance program aimed at his political foes.

Again, this is success in Wolfowitz’s mind. He goes on to concede approvingly that “in fact, something to this effect [Plan Colombia approach] has been the U.S. strategy on the ground [in Afghanistan] for some time now.” He’s right. To be more explicit, we have been supporting a corrupt, unaccountable government in Afghanistan as we are in Colombia. We have also been indirectly fueling the insurgency in a material way, as we have been in Colombia. We have been supporting thuggish Afghan militias as proxy security forces even as they regularly commit savage human rights abuses with impunity.We have been wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money and throwing a vast arsenal of weaponry into a decentralized anarchic country in Afghanistan, as we have in Colombia. So yes, in some ways these strategies overlap.

To his credit, Wolfowitz does acknowledge one thing in the piece that I have to agree with: “it must be acknowledged that more ambitious goals for Afghanistan are not going to come to fruition.” The correct response to this, however, is not to conceive of a new paradigm of forever war. The correct response is to get the hell out and stay out.

Washington Examiner:

Obama’s Justice Department has proposed a regulatory change that would weaken the Freedom of Information Act. Under the new rules, the government could falsely respond to those who file FOIA requests that a document does not exist if it pertains to an ongoing criminal investigation, concerns a terrorist organization, or a counterintelligence operation involving a foreign nation.

Los Angeles Times:

The president who committed himself to “an unprecedented level of openness in government” has followed the example of his predecessor by invoking the “state secrets” privilege to derail litigation about government misdeeds in the war on terror. He has refused to release the administration’s secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which two senators have described as alarming. He has blocked the dissemination of photographs documenting the abuse of prisoners by U.S. service members. And now his Justice Department has proposed to allow government agencies to lie about the existence of documents being sought under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

…This policy is outrageous. It provides a license for the government to lie to its own people and makes a mockery of FOIA. It also would mislead citizens who might file an appeal if they knew there was a possibility that the document they sought was in the possession of a government agency. Such an appeal would allow a court to determine whether the requested document was covered by an exemption in FOIA.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently appeared on Russian television to discuss the current crisis in his country. He reiterated what he has held for months as the primary impetus behind his harsh crackdown on protesters: outside interference is fomenting the unrest and arming Syrians to conduct terrorist acts against the Syrian state. He said that “the Syrian people reject foreign interference and oppose anything which come from outside the country” and that his administration has “information about people leading these operations [protests] outside Syria and in several countries.” He said after looking at the intelligence, “it became irrefutably clear that weapons were being smuggled across the Syrian borders from neighboring countries and funds are being sent from people abroad.”

As Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch sarcastically and succinctly tweeted: “Assad tells Russian TV why it’s ok to kill protesters–it’s all about stopping foreign interference, of course.” Indeed. Looking at it from the outside, Assad’s explanation of the protests and of his unspeakably violent response to them (over 3,000 people killed so far) is easy to identify as propaganda.

Interestingly, though, the Obama administration uses similar commentary as propaganda to justify horrible policies. As Glenn Greenwald rightly pointed out, Sunday’s New York Times article explaining why the Obama administration was surging occupation forces and security cooperation throughout the Middle East as a result of having to pull out of Iraq is “a masterpiece” of “American propaganda about the Middle East.” There are all sorts of linguistic twists, turns, and contortions the Times piece goes through to make official policy not sound utterly ridiculous. At the crux of our interventionist policies toward the region, as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton put it, is the belief that Iraq “should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy.” There it is, popping up again.

This propagandistic excuse is apparently a popular justification for authoritarian policies of the state, of any state. It provides a rather superb rhetorical escape. What it does is it allows the rulers to ascribe some evil monster abroad to any legitimate opposition they face. It allows the sincere wishes of the people to be sunk and lost in a rally against an aggressive and interfering other. In Assad’s case, he can justify using savage violence on thousands of peaceful Arab Spring protesters because the protests are actually more like international terrorism, or possibly outside interference from another government. In America’s case, political elites can justify propping up brutal dictatorships that oppress and torture their populations because, in reality, those tyrannical regimes need our help deterring outside interference which could derail the pathway to democracy (never mind the fact that the people in these countries want nothing more than to be free from the political oppression imposed on them from the United States).

And, of course, as Greenwald points out, and as has been pointed out on this blog innumerable times, the notion of US officials warning against outside interference in the Middle East without recognizing the single most prevalent outside intruder (America) is laughable. As I wrote: “Iraq qualifies as our land because, after all, it’s here on planet Earth. Since we own the world, our jurisdiction extends throughout the globe and anywhere we see unwelcome feet it’s the equivalent of unwelcome feet on the Texas borderland or traversing Cape Cod. Of course, nobody sees the 50,000 U.S. military troops, down from 170,000 at one point, (not to mention contractors) as foreign troops. Our army is always indigenous, because we own the world.”

It’s important to point out just how effective this propaganda is. As Paul Pillar pointed out last month, US propaganda in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was staggeringly outlandish but so successful that large portions of the public still believe it. He wrote:

The manufactured issue of an “alliance” between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaeda demonstrated the manipulative potential involved. Unlike the sales campaign’s companion issue of weapons of mass destruction, there was no logical or historical basis for believing that such an alliance existed. The postulation of such an alliance also contradicted judgments of the U.S. intelligence community and other experts inside and outside government. Getting many members of the public to believe that such an alliance nonetheless existed was partly a matter of touting phony evidence such as a nonexistent meeting in Prague and of making highly tendentious interpretations of other reporting. But promoting this belief was at least as much a matter of rhetorical themes as of manipulated evidence. The belief was cultivated by repeatedly uttering “Iraq,” “9/11” and “war on terror” in the same breath. The cultivation was so successful that by the peak of the war-promoters’ sales campaign in late 2002 a majority of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein not only was allied with al-Qaeda but also had been directly involved in the 9/11 attack.

Now there is evidence of how long-lasting such assiduously promoted falsehoods can be. Majorities may no longer believe in such untruths, but large minorities still do. In a new poll directed by Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland, 38 percent of Americans polled said that the United States had “found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.” In a somewhat differently formulated question, 15 percent said that “Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks” and another 31 percent—for a total of 46 percent—believed that Iraq was not involved in 9/11 but had given “substantial support” to al-Qaeda.

Despite the learnedness of the readers of this site and other Americans who make an actual effort to understand the world and US foreign policy, most Americans don’t understand the United States as the primary source of support to authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. Most Americans don’t have any idea that the US supported supreme despot and torturer of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, and that the initial Arab Spring protests there were met with American-made and donated weapons, killing over 900 people. Most Americans don’t actually know that the people of Bahrain were also murdered savagely by such American gifts to the Bahraini regime while peacefully demonstrating on the streets for their rights. I could go on, but I won’t. But this is partly because of how successful the propaganda efforts of the state and the media are, as exemplified by the New York Times piece on Sunday. Another part of it, to give criticism where it is due, is that Americans by and large make no effort to educate themselves about their own government, instead paying exactly zero attention for four years and then going to the polls to vote themselves other people’s money.

Assad’s propaganda is not different from the US’s. What needs to happen is that the United States government needs to start being seen as as much of an other as Assad. Only then will their lies be equally transparent.

Breaking news — A Bosnian gunman reportedly attacked the US embassy in Sarajevo: he has been shot by police and arrested. I guess this is a “thank you” note for Bill Clinton’s efforts on their behalf.