Month: August 2012

In June, a group of academics from around Latin America plus the US wrote a letter to the State Department railing against the US military presence in Honduras and demanding that aid to the country’s abusive law enforcement apparatus be halted. They exposed the drug war as the farce it is, charging “we are the ones providing all the corpses in your war” and arguing that “combatting drug trafficking is not a legitimate justification for the US to fund and train security forces that usurp democratic governments and violently repress our people.”

The Obama administration has expanded the US military’s presence in Honduras considerably, including sending in commando-style DEA troops to kill and capture people involved in drug trafficking. In just the last few months, those DEA agents have been implicated in killings on three separate instances, one of which ended with four dead civilians, two of whom were pregnant women. Increased US-Honduran cooperation has occurred in tandem with widespread human rights abuses and forced disappearances of political opponents and journalists.

The letter slams Washington for supporting the military coup that took place in 2009:

Our country is in shambles; in part thanks to U.S. “support.” We can never know what would have happened, but had the U.S. State Department respected Honduran and Latin American diplomatic processes following the coup, perhaps our country might not today be considered nationally and internationally as an example of a “failed state.”

…The direct effect of U.S. policy toward Honduras has been to further strengthen the hand of the very people responsible for plotting, carrying out, legitimating, and violently imposing the coup d’état: the armed forces, the court system, the attorney general’s office, the police and powerful business groups. Military officers who led the coup have been assigned top-level positions within the current administration of President Lobo. With “security” as an explanation, Honduran armed forces are no longer required to account for the resources they use and can now make purchases without a tendering process. The current Honduran administration has put our poorly respected civil liberties at greater risk by deputizing soldiers to act as police despite their not being trained for that function but instead having been trained to exterminate the enemy, and giving police, with the new wiretap law, broad powers to audit the personal communication of citizens requiring neither a judge’s nor a DA’s order. All this, in turn, has intensified the climate of insecurity in our country, where citizens often have more reason to fear security forces than they do drug traffickers and gangs.

Then last week the State Department made an announcement that seemed a direct response to the letter, declaring the US would halt aid to Honduras…with some important caveats.

The U.S. government is withholding funds to Honduran law enforcement units directly supervised by their new national police chief until the U.S. can investigate allegations that he ran a death squad a decade ago, according to a State Department report released this week.

The report says the State Department “is aware of allegations of human rights violations related to Police Chief Juan Carlos Bonilla’s service” and that the U.S. government has established a working group to investigate.

The U.S. had pledged $56 million in bilateral security and development assistance for 2012 in Honduras, where tons of drugs pass through each year on their way to the United States. Under the new guidelines, the U.S. is limiting assistance so that it only goes to special Honduran law enforcement units, staffed by Honduran personnel “who receive training, guidance, and advice directly from U.S. law enforcement and are not under Bonilla’s direct supervision,” according to the report.

Nice try, America. So basically the great bulk of US aid to Honduras, which is helping to tear the country apart and steal the rights of the Honduran people, will continue, while some small portion that has some direct connection to a single thuggish police chief is being temporarily halted. The problem is clearly much bigger than one police chief, but the US continues to justify promoting state-terrorism in the name of fighting drugs.

But, as the letter signed by hundreds of academics explained to the State Department “the police and armed forces” that are being armed and trained by Washington “are an integral part of the problem; many of their members are deeply complicit in the drug trade.”

From the Guardian, yet another testimony on how the US-led economic warfare on Iran is tearing people’s lives apart:

For Fatemeh, the pill she takes twice a day in her home in Iran means the difference between life and death. Earlier this summer when she contacted her friend Mohammad in the US to say she was running out of the medicine due to a shortage, the obvious thing for her fellow Iranian to do was to order it from the chemist next door and have it shipped directly to Iran. To the dismay of Fatemeh and Mohammad, the order was rejected because of US sanctions on trade with Iran.

…”My friend suffers from Brugada syndrome [a heart condition] and has abnormal electrocardiogram and is at risk of sudden death,” said Mohammad, who lives in Moorhead, Minnesota. “There is one drug that is very effective in regulating the electrocardiogram, and hence preventing cardiac arrest. It is called quinidine sulfate and is manufactured in the US.”

Mohammad ultimately circumvented the problem by having the medicine ordered to his home address and sent to Iran through friends. “By the time she got the pills, her own supply was finishing within four days, what if we couldn’t send them in time? Who would be responsible if anything had happened to her?” he asked.

The Guardian piece also cites Iran’s Haemophilia Society, which, as Muhammad Sahimi first let Antiwar.com readers know last week, “recently blamed the sanctions for risking thousands of children’s lives due to a lack of proper drugs.” As Sahimi reported, “the sanctions that the United States and its allies have imposed on Iran’s banks and other financial institutions have made importing necessary drugs and medical instruments almost impossible.”

Reports indicate that advanced drugs for a variety of cancers (particularly leukemia), heart diseases, lung problems, multiple sclerosis, and thalassemia cannot be imported, endangering the lives of tens of thousands of people. There are about 37,000 Iranians with multiple sclerosis, a debilitating disease that can be controlled only with advanced medications; without them, the patients will die. And given that, even under the best medical conditions,40,000 Iranians lose their lives to cancer every year, and that it has been predicted by many experts that Iran will have a “cancer tsunami” by 2015, because every year 70,000–80,000 new cases of cancer are identified in Iran, the gravity of the situation becomes even more glaring.

Besides this, unemployment is rising and inflation is spiraling out of control. “Prices of fruit and sugar, among other staples, have soared – in some cases showing threefold and fourfold increases,” Saeed Kamali Dehghan wrote in the Guardian last month. “The price of meat, an essential ingredient of Iranian food, has gone up to such an extent that many now eat it only on special occasions.” This is Iran’s punishment for their non-existent nuclear weapons program.

It’s increasingly obvious that Washington’s aim is to harm the Iranian people. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has admitted they aren’t changing the policies of the regime, but has insisted on their continuance nevertheless. As one of the top supporters of sanctions, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), said, “Critics [of the sanctions] argued that these measures will hurt the Iranian people.  Quite frankly, we need to do just that.” Or take Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY): “The goal … is to inflict crippling, unendurable economic pain over there. Iran’s banking sector — especially its central bank — needs to become the financial equivalent of Chernobyl: radioactive, dangerous and most of all, empty.”

One of the major atrocities of all of post-WWII US foreign policy was the American-led sanctions on Iraq, which ended up killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. We heard the same odious rationales for the sanctions on Iraq as we are now hearing for the sanctions on Iran. Denis Halliday, UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, insisted the effect of the Iraq sanctions “fit the definition of genocide.” If those on Iran are not stopped soon, it may turn out to be just as deadly.

Stephen Walt has a piece up at Foreign Policy cataloguing the persistent predictions of a US or Israeli war on Iran, which always turn out to be dead wrong. My favorite bit:

In September 2010, for example, The Atlantic published a cover story by Jeffrey Goldberg (“The Point of No Return”) based on interviews with dozens of Israeli officials. Goldberg concluded that the odds of an Israeli attack by July 2012 were greater than 50 percent. Fortunately, this forecast proved to be as accurate as most of Goldberg’s other writings about the Middle East.

The predictions from the elite media figures and journalists typically occur in tandem with direct threats from Israeli officials, of course. The constant bluster is ironic, considering how strongly it influences Iran towards getting the bomb (Iran has cleverly chosen “strategic ambiguity” instead).

But Walt’s piece reminded me of this timeline from the Christian Science Monitor back in November of last year listing official warnings of an imminent Iranian nuke for about thirty years now. According to western intelligence, they’ve pretty much always been on the verge of having the bomb. Below is a summary:

• 1984: West German intelligence sources say Iran’s production of a bomb “is entering its final stages.”
• 1992: Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres tells French TV that Iran was set to have nuclear warheads by 1999.
• 1995: New York Times reports US and Israeli concerns that ”Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought” – about five years away.
• 1998: New York Times reports that long-range missile development indicates that “Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reports to Congress that Iran could build an intercontinental ballistic missile – one that could hit the US – within five years. The CIA gave a timeframe of 12 years.
• 2002: CIA warns that the danger from nuclear-tipped missiles from Iran is higher than during the Cold War. Dubious claims from the MeK (now widely believed to be passed on by Israeli intelligence) say that Iran has undisclosed uranium enrichment facilities in breach of IAEA safeguards.
• 2004: Secretary of State Colin Powell claims Iran is working on technology to fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile. “We are talking about information that says they not only have [the] missiles but information that suggests they are working hard about how to put the two together,” he said.
• 2005: U.S. presents 1,000 pages documentation allegedly retrieved from a computer laptop in Iran, which detail high-explosives testing and a nuclear-capable missile warhead.
• 2006: New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh quotes US sources saying that a preemptive strike on Iran is all but inevitable.
• 2007: Bush and Cheney imply an impending attack on Iran if it doesn’t give up it’s nuclear program. A month later, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran is released, which controversially judges with “high confidence” that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons effort in fall 2003.

Yet, in the shadow of Ehud Barak’s bluster yesterday, people are still gullible enough to believe these clowns.

According to CBS News, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has leaked information to the press about a new, and allegedly more damning, assessment from the US intelligence community about Iran’s nuclear program. Ever since the US National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran halted any semblance of a weapons program back in 2003, Israel has been grudgingly working their hawkish rhetoric around that inconvenient conclusion. Now they’ve apparently pounced at the opportunity to amplify press coverage of another assessment, which according to CBS doesn’t conclude Iran has a nuclear weapons program, but says “Iran has made surprising, significant progress toward military nuclear capability,” as stated by Barak.

Earlier in the week I debunked a new report from Haaretz making these same claims, but naming no names. See here for why the new rumors lack any credibility.

The Obama administration has so far refused to speak about this latest news. Trita Parsi, who has demonstrated high-level contacts in the US government, tweeted that behind the scenes Washington is “livid” about Barak’s leaking. No other information has yet been forthcoming.

In the meantime, here’s Nima Shirazi’s pithy take:

From The New York Times on September 8, 2002:

 

From Ha’aretz on August 9, 2012:

Update: Laura Rosen at Al-Monitor on Barak’s leaks:

“The rules of the spy game are clear,” former US Navy intelligence analyst John Schindlerwrote on his blog. “When intelligence services share information, as they do every day, you don’t pass it to third parties without clearance. Ever. And if you do, eventually you will get burned and nobody will want to play marbles with you.”

…Non-proliferation analysts speculated that it could involve one of the categories of continuing research activities specified by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its November 2011 report on Iran. Those research activities were engaging in experimental research, after 2003, on hemispherical initiation of high explosives; further validation, after 2006, of a neutron initiator design; conducting modeling studies, in 2008 and 2009, that could determine the yield of a nuclear explosion.

However, “carrying on scattered research activities does not amount to a full-fledged restart of an integrated weapons program,” Greg Thielmann, a former US intelligence analyst and senior fellow at the Arms Control Association, wrote in an ACA Iran Nuclear Threat Assessment brief (.pdf).

See here and here for information on that November IAEA report and why it changes nothing.

Update II: From Reuters – “US still believes Iran not on verge of nuclear weapon“

The Washington Post published a remarkable piece on the front page yesterday on Syria. It was remarkable for the sheer ingenuity with which it developed a new and predictably awful reason for a broader US military intervention there. The reporter, Liz Sly, interviewed some rebel fighters and some DC hawks who argued that America’s failure to launch a war on behalf of the Free Syrian Army will stoke resentment and anti-American hatred among Syrians.

“America will pay a price for this,” Yasser Abu Ali, a spokesman for one of the Free Syrian Army battalions told the Post. “America is going to lose the friendship of Syrians, and no one will trust them anymore. Already we don’t trust them at all.”

I’m sorry, this simply doesn’t cut it. One of the most basic truisms of US foreign policy in the modern context is that incessant American intervention in the Arab world causes hatred and resentment. What the Post’s article is trying to do is overturn this elemental fact of consistently recorded Arab public opinion. US interventionism has been the cause of rivers of bloodshed in the recent history of the Middle East – and this has been the cause of anti-American sentiment, not to mention the propping up of dictators that abuse and enslave populations for decades. Intervening militarily in Syria is likely to worsen the conflict and to instigate an even more violent sectarian conflict.

Furthermore, asking a few rebel fighters about the collective opinions of almost 21 million Syrians is not going to get you very far. The rebels still make up a fraction of the Syrian population and, by most accounts, the vast majority of ordinary Syrians do not support the rebels, their overthrow of Assad, or their rise to power.

If Washington continues on its current path, “ultimately the political entity that comes to power is not going to be in U.S. interests,” [said Andrew Tabler of the Washington Institute of Near East Affairs]. “A secular and democratic Syria is what we’re going to lose big-time.”

The ideological make-up of the Syrian rebels is decidedly not secular and democratic, so I’m not sure where Tabler gets off. Many of the 300 or so disparate rebel battalions are very religious Sunnis who have been committing reprisal attacks against Shiites and Christians. Up to a quarter, according to US intelligence (probably a low-ball estimate), are fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda. The rebels are also receiving weapons and support from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, not exactly bastions of secularism and democracy but surely two countries that will have a strong influence on any future Free Syrian Army.

The argument for intervention from the Washington Post disregards recent history. Take Afghanistan, where the US supported a similar set of jihadist freedom fighters in the 1980s, only to have them later come to power as one of the most terrible and backward religious fundamentalist ruling clans in the world. They later hosted al-Qaeda preceding the 9/11 attacks. As Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, responded to the Post’s type of argument:

The United States provided battlefield intelligence, money, and weapons and ammunition (up to 65,000 tons a year by 1987) to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, some of whom later became members the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. Not surprisingly, once the Taliban came to power it was not willingly directed by the United States, refusing repeated requests by the Clinton administration to kick out Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda leadership. In Rwanda, the United States didn’t provide arms or intervene militarily during the genocide in 1994, yet somehow Paul Kagame’s government finds itself able to accept $200M in U.S. foreign assistance every year. Likewise, the future leaders of Syria will act in their own national interests with whoever it needs to, regardless of who is arming or funding the revolution today.

And here’s Paul Pillar, former CIA Mid-East analyst, on the supposed gratitude-inducing effects of US interventionism:

U.S. support and involvement in Afghanistan do underlie much of what bedevils that country and the United States today. U.S. lethal support gave an important boost to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and it was even more important in developing into an effective fighting force the Haqqani group—which is now so much of an antagonist to the United States that it is the subject of Congressional resolutions urging the secretary of state to designate it formally as a foreign terrorist organization. Some gratitude.

Then there was the war in Iraq, sold partly on the idea that the United States would be lovingly showered with gratitude from Iraqis welcoming Americans as liberators. The war did not, of course, turn out anything like that. Even when events in Iraq have enjoyed an uptick or two, Iraqis have been slow to credit the United States for anything that has gone well and persistent in blaming the United States for much of what is still not going well.

And Daniel Larison contrasted the Post’s claims with a citation from the New York Times “on the growing anti-Americanism among secular Syrians and Syria’s religious minorities, who believe the U.S. is doing far too much for the opposition already”:

The seeming indifference of the international community to the worsening condition of Syria’s religious minorities — and the near total absence of censure of the opposition forces by the Western governments arrayed against Assad — is breeding a bitter anti-Americanism among many secular Syrians who see the United States aligning itself with Saudi Arabia, the fount of Wahhabism, against the Arab world’s most resolutely secular state.