By William Fisher
Haiti experts are warning that unless the international community comes up with new, more imaginative and more inclusive approaches to reconstruction and development in the earthquake-ravaged nation, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country can look forward to more of the same.
They see the suffering and deprivation caused by the earthquake as a human and physical disaster. But they also see it as an opportunity to change the way aid is allocated, managed and distributed so that it results in progress that works for all the people, not simply the country’s elites. The goal, they say, is better-built roads and buildings, sound education, infrastructure and public health and justice systems. They believe that this goal demands an approach to development planning that calls for the active participation of the Haitian people.
“Without it,” says Robert Maguire, a professor at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. and head of the Haiti working group at the U.S. Institute of Peace, “We will simply see another lost generation -- with hundreds of millions of donor dollars being directed to projects that perpetuate the status quo and enrich those business, government and military elites who have been personally profiting from international donor generosity for many generations.”
One of the more experienced Haiti experts, Maguire adds, “Haiti is a lot more than a free-enterprise-zone filled with low-wage textile workers.”
And Bill Quigley, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, and a Katrina survivor who has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice, puts the challenge this way:
“The current crisis is an opportunity for people in the US to own up to our country’s history of dominating Haiti and to make a truly just response.”
The story of Haiti and international efforts to influence it is complicated by history, politics, greed, corruption, waste and race.
Here’s how that history is seen by Quigley:
He contends that the US owes Haiti billions of dollars. He bases this assessment on Colin Powell’s ‘Pottery Barn rule’ -- ‘If you break it, you own it.”
Quigley says, “The US has worked to break Haiti for over 200 years. The US has used Haiti like a plantation. The US helped bleed the country economically since it freed itself, repeatedly invaded the country militarily, supported dictators who abused the people, used the country as a dumping ground for our own economic advantage, ruined their roads and agriculture, and toppled popularly elected officials. The US has even used Haiti like the old plantation owner and slipped over there repeatedly for sexual recreation.”
Quigley recalls that in 1804, when Haiti achieved its freedom from France in the world’s first successful slave revolution, the United States refused to recognize the country.
He writes, “The US continued to refuse recognition to Haiti for 60 more years. Why? Because the US continued to enslave millions of its own citizens and feared recognizing Haiti would encourage slave revolution in the US.”
Following the slave revolution in 1804, “Haiti was the subject of a crippling economic embargo by France and the US. US sanctions lasted until 1863. France ultimately used its military power to force Haiti to pay reparations for the slaves who were freed,” Quigley says.
“The reparations were 150 million francs. (France sold the entire Louisiana
territory to the US for 80 million francs!) Haiti was forced to borrow money from banks in France and the US to pay reparations to France. A major loan from the US to pay off the French was finally paid off in 1947. The current value of the money Haiti was forced to pay to French and US banks? Over $20 Billion – with a big B.
Racial politics have always played a significant role in Haiti. Generally, largesse from the international community has gone to the light-skinned, French-speaking Haitian elites in government, business and the military. Corruption among these elites was legend.
Little aid actually got to the darker-skinned, Creole-speaking “common people” of the country – and the elites built no school systems, no public health systems, no infrastructure for these common people.
In fact, at one point in its storied history, Haiti was divided into separate sections for lighter and darker-skin citizens. In 1806, Haiti consisted of a black-controlled north and a mulatto-ruled south. That was a mere five years after a former black slave, Toussaint Louverture, became a guerrilla leader and overthrew French rule, abolished slavery and proclaimed himself governor-general of an autonomous government. For decades afterward, Haiti was crippled by reparations it was forced to pay to former slaveowners.
Quigley recalls that “The US occupied and ruled Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934. President Woodrow Wilson sent troops to invade in 1915. Revolts by Haitians were put down by US military – killing over 2000 in one skirmish alone. For the next nineteen years, the US controlled customs in Haiti, collected taxes, and ran many governmental institutions. How many billions were siphoned off by the US during these 19 years?”
Then, he says, from 1957 to 1986, “Haiti was forced to live under US backed dictators ‘Papa Doc and ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier. The US supported these dictators economically and militarily because they did what the US wanted and were politically “anti-communist” – now translatable as against human rights for their people.”
Quigley charges that Duvalier “stole millions from Haiti and ran up hundreds of millions in debt that Haiti still owes. Ten thousand Haitians lost their lives. Estimates say that Haiti owes $1.3 billion in external debt and that 40% of that debt was run up by the US-backed Duvaliers.”
He says, “Thirty years ago Haiti imported no rice. Today Haiti imports nearly all its rice. Though Haiti was the sugar growing capital of the Caribbean, it now imports sugar as well. Why? The US and the US dominated world financial institutions – the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – forced Haiti to open its markets to the world. Then the US dumped millions of tons of US subsidized rice and sugar into Haiti – undercutting their farmers and ruining Haitian agriculture. By ruining Haitian agriculture, the US has forced Haiti into becoming the third largest world market for US rice. Good for US farmers, bad for Haiti.”
Quigley notes that in 2002, during the George W. Bush administration, “the US stopped hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to Haiti which were to be used for, among other public projects like education, roads. These are the same roads that relief teams are having so much trouble navigating now!”
And, two years later, he says, “the US again destroyed democracy in Haiti when they supported the coup against Haiti’s elected President Aristide.”
In the area of economic development, Quigley notes that “US based corporations have for years been teaming up with Haitian elite to run sweatshops teeming with tens of thousands of Haitians who earn less than $2 a day.”
“The Haitian people have resisted the economic and military power of the US and others ever since their independence. Like all of us, Haitians made their own mistakes as well. But US power has forced Haitians to pay great prices – deaths, debt and abuse.
“It is time for the people of the US to join with Haitians and reverse the course of US-Haitian relations.
Robert Maguire of the U.S. Institute of Peace says, “At times, American policy makers have watched Haiti with deep concern over the impact of developments there on the US. Certainly this was the case in the aftermath of Haiti’s independence in
1804, when American leaders, particularly in its plantation South, feared that the Caribbean country’s ’virus of freedom’ would spread to the slave plantations in the Carolinas, Georgia, Maryland and Virginia. Other times, American engagement in Haiti has evolved far beyond observation to direct intervention, most notably during the 19-year US military occupation of 1915 to 1934.”
Veteran journalist Greg Palast also takes a dark look at Haiti’s history – including the performance of the international aid community in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.
“Send in the Marines.” he writes. “That's America's response. That's what we're good at. The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson finally showed up after three days. With what? It was dramatically deployed — without any emergency relief supplies. It has sidewinder missiles and 19 helicopters.”
But, he says, “don't worry, the International Search and Rescue Team, fully equipped and self-sufficient for up to seven days in the field, deployed immediately with ten metric tons of tools and equipment, three tons of water, tents, advanced communication equipment and water purifying capability. They're from Iceland.”
Gates wouldn't send in food and water because, he said, there was no "structure ... to provide security." For Gates, appointed by Bush and allowed to hang around by Obama, it's security first. That was his lesson from Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater before drinking water,” he says.
Palast asks, “How did Haiti end up so economically weakened, with infrastructure, from hospitals to water systems, busted or non-existent - there are two fire stations in the entire nation - and infrastructure so frail that the nation was simply waiting for ‘nature’ to finish it off? “
For Palast, the blame lies as much with Haiti’s corruption and the donor community’s acquiescence as with the earthquake.
“Don’t blame Mother Nature for all this death and destruction. That dishonor goes to Papa Doc and Baby Doc, the Duvalier dictatorship, which looted the nation for 28 years. Papa and his Baby put an estimated 80% of world aid into their own pockets - with the complicity of the US government happy to have the Duvaliers and their voodoo militia, Tonton Macoutes, as allies in the Cold War. (The war was easily won: the Duvaliers’ death squads murdered as many as 60,000 opponents of the regime),” he says.
“What Papa and Baby didn't run off with, the IMF finished off through its
‘austerity’ plans. An austerity plan is a form of voodoo orchestrated by
economists zomby-fied by an irrational belief that cutting government services will somehow help a nation prosper,” he says.
In 1991, he recalls, “five years after the murderous Baby fled, Haitians elected a priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who resisted the IMF's austerity diktats. Within months, the military, to the applause of Papa George HW Bush, deposed him.”
History repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce,” he says. “The farce was George W. Bush. In 2004, after the priest Aristide was re-elected President, he was kidnapped and removed again, to the applause of Baby Bush.”
Against that background, what is being proposed and who is proposing it?
Ideas are arising from many quarters.
In an editorial (Monday Feb. 1), The New York Times proposed four principles to guide the reconstruction phase of international aid. Aid programs, it said, should promote self-sufficiency, open up the countryside, rebuild and maintain infrastructure, and tap the Diaspora.
It noted that Haiti has considerable economic advantages, like low labor costs and a law that grants its goods preferential access to the United States market. Extending that law and encouraging investments in industries like garment-making and tourism could swiftly create tens of thousands of jobs. Rebuilding and modernizing agriculture to grow staples and export products like coffee and mangoes would mean food, cash and employment. Dispersing the population beyond overbuilt, overburdened cities, like the now-shattered capital, is a good idea now cloaked in urgency.
It concludes: “It will take a lot of money, creativity, and vigilance and sustained commitment to rebuild Haiti — from Haitians and from the world. There are smart people thinking about how to do it. And that is a start.”
Haiti may be suffering from shortages of many things, but recommendations are not one of them. Among them is the suggestion that Haiti should be temporarily taken over by an international organization, which would govern it and oversee its rebuilding. Counter by the belief that years of failed, foreign-imposed aid projects underscore that this time Haitians need to develop and implement their own plans. Followed by calls for a joint Haitian-international reconstruction agency to administer a kind of Haitian Marshall Plan.
UN secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is expected to announce shortly that former President Bill Clinton will take on an expanded role in coordinating United Nations efforts to resurrect Haiti.
Another idea has come from former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Appearing on MSNBC last week, he suggested that the United Nations should establish a temporary “protectorate” over Haiti during the reconstruction period. During that time the UN would be in complete charge and Haiti ‘s government would, in effect, have little influence over events. The former Jimmy Carter lieutenant acknowledged that such an effort would need to be crafted and explained very carefully so that no one confuses it with Colonialism.
It is unclear how Brzezinski’s idea would square with an objective hailed by almost everyone – making the aid effort more inclusive.
But for any of these ideas to come to fruition, most experts agree that a
sea-change will be necessary among all the stakeholders – Haitian, US and international.
For example, Haiti must avoid the debacle of 2008, when lack of access to clean water posed devastating health consequences and constituted a clear violation of Haitians’ right to water according to both domestic and international legal obligations.
That revelation was contained in a report from the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), Partners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Lasante. The release of the report, “Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti,” came just months after public outrage over rising food prices led to a full-blown political crisis in Haiti.
One of the report’s main findings was of an undeniable link between the
international community’s political interference and the intolerably poor state of potable water in Haiti. Using documents obtained by the RFK Center through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department, the report exposes the U.S. government’s role in blocking the disbursal of millions of dollars in loans that would have had life-saving consequences for the Haitian people.
The loans, which the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved in 1998 for urgently needed water and sanitation projects in Haiti, were derailed in 2001 by politically-motivated, behind-the-scenes interventions on behalf of the United States and other members of the international community.
The director of one of the groups, Monika Kalra Varma, Director of the RFK Center for Human Rights, told Truthout, “Over the years, help for Haiti has been shaped by ideological politics and broken promises.”
She charged that, “Generally the international community has made pledges to Haiti and not fulfilled them. Donor states have human rights obligations in Haiti as well - they must do no harm. When states pledge funds to Haiti which the Haitian people and government rely on in figuring out how to meet the needs of its people, particularly when you're talking about monetary pledges to strengthen water, education, and health systems and that money doesn't come in, the donors have violated their human rights obligations.”
Journalist and historian Eric Michael Johnson, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that “Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries.”
“Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are proposing an even larger program following the same mode,” he says.
Johnson writes that “since 2004 Haitian exports to the United States increased by 32%while, during the same period, the Haitian minimum wage declined by 36%. “
Yet another approach is being suggested by two old Haiti hands, Robert Muggah and Robert Maguire. Robert Muggah, based at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, is a principal of the SecDev Group and is currently advising multilateral and bilateral organizations on Haiti's recovery. As noted earlier, Robert Maguire is on the faculty of Trinity Washington University and chairs the Haiti Working Group at the US Institute of Peace.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on January 31, Maguire and Muggah suggested that a 700,000-strong Haitian national civic service corps “would harness untapped labor rapidly and instill national pride and confidence.”
“Haiti will need big ideas to recover and rebuild in the aftermath of the devastating magnitude 7.0 earthquake this month. The reported death toll has topped 150,000, and the reconstruction needs are incalculable. How about starting with a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth? There are many reasons why such an entity makes a lot of sense,” they write, adding:
”Haiti is a young country. An estimated 70% of the population is under 30; the 15-to-29 segment alone makes up 50% of the population. Demographers have long cautioned how excessively youthful populations can potentially exacerbate underdevelopment and accentuate political instability. Although Haiti registers among the lowest levels of education in the Western Hemisphere, Haitian youth are a wellspring of creativity, talent and potential. You don't need to be a community-development specialist to know that they are stifled by a lack of meaningful opportunities.”
Fortunately, they say, “Haiti has an enabling environment to set up a civic service corps. Article 52 of the Haitian Constitution commits citizens to national service, though it has never been activated. What is more, there are many Haitian and international organizations mobilized and ready to help the government get this going.”
They believe a civic service corps “would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince and into work. They could start with the once-iconic center of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti's countryside. At a minimum, this would reverse generations of unfair stigmatizing of the youth there.”
This plan, they say, “would also harness untapped labor rapidly. Before the Jan. 12 earthquake, 50% of youth in their 20s were out of work. Putting them in service toward rebuilding the capital and outlying areas would be a first step to restoring their and their country's pride and dignity.”
The Kennedy Center’s Kalra Varma noted that multilateral aid has frequently been marked by stop-start-stop politics, with aid stopping when Haiti elects a leader not favored by donors. She cites the refusal of the
Inter American Development Bank (IDB) to release funds earmarked for water projects, which would have benefited the poor. “The IDB is controlled by its largest donor, the U.S. and the U.S. did not like Haiti’s government of the day,” she said.
She added, “All too often, aid has been slow to arrive, uncoordinated, and planned with no input from the people most affected -- that legacy must and can end today. We have an opportunity to break with the past and ensure that assistance is given in a way that strengthens Haitians’ fundamental rights to food, water, and health. The Haitian people deserve no less.”
The other groups include the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante, and TransAfrica Forum.
Loune Viaud, Director of Strategic Planning and Operations at Zanmi Lasante, a health organization, cautioned, “The only way to avoid escalation of this crisis is for international aid to take a long-term view and strive to rebuild a stronger Haiti—one that includes a government that can ensure the basic human rights of all Haitians and a nation that is empowered to demand those rights.”
The groups cited past relief efforts in Haiti that were uncoordinated, unpredictable, and lacked community participation, often leading to increased suffering. They called on the international community to seize on this opportunity to advance human rights and sustainability in the ravaged country.
“The magnitude of the catastrophe is not entirely a result of natural disaster but rather, a history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment of the Haitian people through a series of misguided polices,” said Brian Concannon Jr., Director of IJDH. “Lack of donor accountability and continued aid volatility will only guarantee even greater suffering.”
In an editorial prepared for distribution, Kalra Varma and Kerry Kennedy, wrote, “ As international aid begins to pour into Haiti, we have a brief moment to break with past mistakes and bring real change to Haiti.” U.S and international aid efforts “could be characterized, at best, as unsustainable and, at worst, deliberately harmful,” they wrote. Kerry Kennedy is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.
The editorial continues, “In 2000, the U.S. and the Inter-American Development Bank approved millions of dollars of what would have been lifesaving loans for improvements to water, health, education, and road infrastructure, only to later withhold these funds because they opposed then President Aristide. While the loans were eventually released, the communities where the very first water projects were to be financed still lack access, ten years later, to reliably clean drinking water, contributing to countless deaths due to waterborne illness.”
It adds, “In 2004, the international community pledged $1 billion to support Haiti. The RFK Center, along with the health organization Zanmi Lasante and the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, tried to track the fulfillment of those pledges, but never received clear and consistent answers from donor states on the status of the aid. With no transparency or coordinating body to turn to, the Haitian people had no hope of knowing if that money ever got to Haiti, much less where it was directed and how it could be used to improve their communities. Haitian government sources later confirmed that most of the pledges had never been fulfilled.”
The future of Haiti is a huge question mark. An even larger question is whether the US and the international community will set aside ancient prejudices that historically have stood in the way of imaginative and inclusive approaches to Haitian reconstruction and development – and will do so again unless there is a dramatic change of mindset, strategy and tactics.
This article originally appeared at Truthout.org.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Seven Paragraphs That Shook US-UK Relationship
By William Fisher
A British court has ordered the publication of previously secret information that appears to reveal the UK government's complicity with the US in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident who was imprisoned by the US at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The decision by the English Court of Appeals affirmed an earlier High Court ruling that ordered the release of seven paragraphs that the British government had sought to suppress because the administration of US president Barack Obama "explicitly threatened that publishing the information would harm the intelligence-sharing relationship between the two nations."
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband argued that the publication of those seven paragraphs would endanger Britain's national security.
But, as the Court of Appeals noted in their decision, the information at issue had already been placed in the public domain through a U.S. court decision in November 2009. In that case the judge, after reviewing extensive evidence of Mohamed's allegations of torture, noted that the government did "not challenge or deny the accuracy of Binyam Mohamed's story of brutal treatment."
Jonathan Evans, director general of the British intelligence service MI5, denied his staff had withheld documents relating to Mohamed from the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) or sought to cover up its involvement in the torture of detainees.
Evans said claims by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, that there was a "culture of suppression" within the service were "the precise opposite of the truth."
In an article in the UK’s DailyTelegraph newspaper, Evans wrote that MI5 was trying to protect the country from "enemies" who would use "all the tools at their disposal" – including propaganda – to attack.
"We will do all that we can to keep the country safe from terrorist attack. We will use all the powers available to us under the law," he wrote.
MI5 told the ISC Mohamed was interrogated "in line with the service's guidance to staff on contact with detainees".
However, a seven-paragraph summary released by the appeal court shows that the CIA told MI5 Mohamed had been subjected to "continuous sleep deprivation ... threats and inducements".
While Mohamed's case has wound its way through the English courts, he has also sought justice in American courts as the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against Jeppesen DataPlan, a Boeing subsidiary. That lawsuit, Mohamed v. Jeppesen, charges that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the CIA's forced disappearance and torture of Mohamed and four other men through the provision of critical flight planning and logistical support services to the aircraft and crews used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its "extraordinary rendition" program.
The Obama administration has sought to dismiss the Jeppesen case at the very outset by invoking the “state secrets privilege”, claiming that allowing this case to proceed will endanger national security. Last December, the case was reheard by a panel of eleven judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Their decision is pending.
Asked by IPS about the UK court’s decision to release the seven-paragraph document, ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner said, “Never before have so many high-level officials worked so hard to suppress what everyone already knew. Think about it: Here we have two heads of government, two secretaries of state, the chiefs of two intelligence services, and many others at the highest levels of government, all conspiring to hide information that was in plain view.”
The only remarkable thing about the released document is how unremarkable it is!” he added.
The document, he told IPS, “has nothing to do with protecting national security. It has only to do with preventing legal accountability for torture. But the wall of impunity is crumbling.”
Wizner told IPS the ACLU would file a new motion to call the attention of the Ninth Circuit judges to the British decision.
He said he “doesn’t see how the U.S. government can invoke the state secrets privilege to keep the Jeppesen case from coming to court when all of the so-called state secrets are now in the public domain.”
Binyam Mohamed was under the control or in the custody of U.S. authorities for seven years before his release back to his home in England in February last year.
The released paragraphs confirm Binyam’s torture, referring to his sleep deprivation, the threat to ‘disappear’ him, the fact that ‘the interviews were having a marked effect on him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering’ and the fact that ‘the reports provided to the SyS made clear to anyone reading them that BM was subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment.’
US officials played down claims that the appeal court's disclosure of CIA information passed to MI5 would damage intelligence-sharing with Britain, as fresh doubts emerged about the accuracy of information given to MPs.
But Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, said the US was "deeply disappointed" in the court judgment. "We shared this information in confidence and with certain expectations," he added.
Another White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the court decision would not provoke a broad review of intelligence liaison between Britain and the US because the need for close co-operation was greater than ever.
The UK government has indicated that it will not appeal the judgment.
Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, said: “Our government went to enormous lengths to prevent the British public from seeing this tiny fraction of Binyam’s story. They still refuse to admit that he was abused. Today’s decision is very welcome, but the paragraphs revealed are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to British complicity in torture – much more is to come.”
The redacted paragraphs:
“It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM (Binyam Mohamed) had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.
“It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him.
“ His fears of being removed from United States custody and ‘disappearing’ were played upon.
“It was reported that the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics was increased by him being shackled in his interviews
“It was clear not only from the reports of the content of the interviews but also from the report that he was being kept under self-harm observation, that the inter views were having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering.
“We regret to have to conclude that the reports provided to the SyS made clear to anyone reading them that BM (Binyam Mohamed) was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment.
“The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972. Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities.”
A British court has ordered the publication of previously secret information that appears to reveal the UK government's complicity with the US in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident who was imprisoned by the US at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The decision by the English Court of Appeals affirmed an earlier High Court ruling that ordered the release of seven paragraphs that the British government had sought to suppress because the administration of US president Barack Obama "explicitly threatened that publishing the information would harm the intelligence-sharing relationship between the two nations."
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband argued that the publication of those seven paragraphs would endanger Britain's national security.
But, as the Court of Appeals noted in their decision, the information at issue had already been placed in the public domain through a U.S. court decision in November 2009. In that case the judge, after reviewing extensive evidence of Mohamed's allegations of torture, noted that the government did "not challenge or deny the accuracy of Binyam Mohamed's story of brutal treatment."
Jonathan Evans, director general of the British intelligence service MI5, denied his staff had withheld documents relating to Mohamed from the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) or sought to cover up its involvement in the torture of detainees.
Evans said claims by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, that there was a "culture of suppression" within the service were "the precise opposite of the truth."
In an article in the UK’s DailyTelegraph newspaper, Evans wrote that MI5 was trying to protect the country from "enemies" who would use "all the tools at their disposal" – including propaganda – to attack.
"We will do all that we can to keep the country safe from terrorist attack. We will use all the powers available to us under the law," he wrote.
MI5 told the ISC Mohamed was interrogated "in line with the service's guidance to staff on contact with detainees".
However, a seven-paragraph summary released by the appeal court shows that the CIA told MI5 Mohamed had been subjected to "continuous sleep deprivation ... threats and inducements".
While Mohamed's case has wound its way through the English courts, he has also sought justice in American courts as the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against Jeppesen DataPlan, a Boeing subsidiary. That lawsuit, Mohamed v. Jeppesen, charges that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the CIA's forced disappearance and torture of Mohamed and four other men through the provision of critical flight planning and logistical support services to the aircraft and crews used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in its "extraordinary rendition" program.
The Obama administration has sought to dismiss the Jeppesen case at the very outset by invoking the “state secrets privilege”, claiming that allowing this case to proceed will endanger national security. Last December, the case was reheard by a panel of eleven judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Their decision is pending.
Asked by IPS about the UK court’s decision to release the seven-paragraph document, ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner said, “Never before have so many high-level officials worked so hard to suppress what everyone already knew. Think about it: Here we have two heads of government, two secretaries of state, the chiefs of two intelligence services, and many others at the highest levels of government, all conspiring to hide information that was in plain view.”
The only remarkable thing about the released document is how unremarkable it is!” he added.
The document, he told IPS, “has nothing to do with protecting national security. It has only to do with preventing legal accountability for torture. But the wall of impunity is crumbling.”
Wizner told IPS the ACLU would file a new motion to call the attention of the Ninth Circuit judges to the British decision.
He said he “doesn’t see how the U.S. government can invoke the state secrets privilege to keep the Jeppesen case from coming to court when all of the so-called state secrets are now in the public domain.”
Binyam Mohamed was under the control or in the custody of U.S. authorities for seven years before his release back to his home in England in February last year.
The released paragraphs confirm Binyam’s torture, referring to his sleep deprivation, the threat to ‘disappear’ him, the fact that ‘the interviews were having a marked effect on him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering’ and the fact that ‘the reports provided to the SyS made clear to anyone reading them that BM was subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment.’
US officials played down claims that the appeal court's disclosure of CIA information passed to MI5 would damage intelligence-sharing with Britain, as fresh doubts emerged about the accuracy of information given to MPs.
But Ben LaBolt, a White House spokesman, said the US was "deeply disappointed" in the court judgment. "We shared this information in confidence and with certain expectations," he added.
Another White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the court decision would not provoke a broad review of intelligence liaison between Britain and the US because the need for close co-operation was greater than ever.
The UK government has indicated that it will not appeal the judgment.
Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, said: “Our government went to enormous lengths to prevent the British public from seeing this tiny fraction of Binyam’s story. They still refuse to admit that he was abused. Today’s decision is very welcome, but the paragraphs revealed are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to British complicity in torture – much more is to come.”
The redacted paragraphs:
“It was reported that at some stage during that further interview process by the United States authorities, BM (Binyam Mohamed) had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed.
“It was reported that combined with the sleep deprivation, threats and inducements were made to him.
“ His fears of being removed from United States custody and ‘disappearing’ were played upon.
“It was reported that the stress brought about by these deliberate tactics was increased by him being shackled in his interviews
“It was clear not only from the reports of the content of the interviews but also from the report that he was being kept under self-harm observation, that the inter views were having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering.
“We regret to have to conclude that the reports provided to the SyS made clear to anyone reading them that BM (Binyam Mohamed) was being subjected to the treatment that we have described and the effect upon him of that intentional treatment.
“The treatment reported, if had been administered on behalf of the United Kingdom, would clearly have been in breach of the undertakings given by the United Kingdom in 1972. Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities.”
Saturday, February 06, 2010
The Silence of the Sheep
By William Fisher
“In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.”
That’s the lead paragraph of the news story I wrote for InterPress News Service last Friday. Since then, I just haven’t been able to get this thing out of my mind.
Think about it: “…may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.”
That means that the president of the United States can decide who lives and who doesn’t. Not a court. Not a jury. Just the president.
The proposition is overwhelming in its simplicity. And in its stupidity. And in its cavalier abandonment of our most precious principle: the rule of law. That quaint tradition we always cite as the root of our American “exceptionalism.”
The key word here is suspected. Killing U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.
That means we must all believe that our intelligence mavens are perfect, infallible, incapable of error.
But common sense and history should tell us this cannot be true. Our intelligence folks make mistakes all the time. They are humans and humans cannot be infallible. And their performance in recent years has not been all that stellar. Think WMD. Think 9/11. Think Maher Arar. Think Brandon Mayfield. Think Richard Jewel and Steven Hatfill.
Lots of little slipups here!
But those errors are correctible. After we go ahead and kill someone, there’s no do-over. There’s nothing more final than death.
I found Admiral Blair’s revelation so troubling that I consulted some of the country’s most respected Constitutional scholars to see if I was missing something.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t. As Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told me, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
He said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars’. The Bush Administration reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a "dirty war" around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.”
And where is the outrage? Mostly, it isn’t. Our elected officials are driven by fear or actively trying to drive us with fear, or both. And we who elected them are busy being terrified and looking the other way while we try to find jobs and pay the mortgage and feed the kids.
But even in good times, we Americans are not the best-informed citizens. We are far more likely to rail inchoately against “government interference” in our lives. Witness the tea-baggers.
Well, doesn’t it seem to you that killing American citizens represents a tad more than “interference” in our lives? Surely the killed would think so.
Maybe people just think Barack Obama would never, ever order any American citizen targeted and killed. Even if that were true – and we don’t know that – we ought at least to be worried about Obama’s successors.
Suppose it’s a Dick Nixon? Or a George W. Bush? The powers Obama enjoys today will be used – and likely misused – by others later on. And we can’t know what champions of The Imperial Presidency will emerge in our uncertain future.
Some of us thought George Bush should be impeached for eavesdropping on our phone calls and emails without a court order. That violated our Fourth Amendment right to be free from illegal searches. That was about our privacy; this is about our murder!
And collectively we all decide to go to the mall!
Our silence keeps reminding me of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 speech, in which he famously said,
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.
“In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.”
That’s the lead paragraph of the news story I wrote for InterPress News Service last Friday. Since then, I just haven’t been able to get this thing out of my mind.
Think about it: “…may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.”
That means that the president of the United States can decide who lives and who doesn’t. Not a court. Not a jury. Just the president.
The proposition is overwhelming in its simplicity. And in its stupidity. And in its cavalier abandonment of our most precious principle: the rule of law. That quaint tradition we always cite as the root of our American “exceptionalism.”
The key word here is suspected. Killing U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.
That means we must all believe that our intelligence mavens are perfect, infallible, incapable of error.
But common sense and history should tell us this cannot be true. Our intelligence folks make mistakes all the time. They are humans and humans cannot be infallible. And their performance in recent years has not been all that stellar. Think WMD. Think 9/11. Think Maher Arar. Think Brandon Mayfield. Think Richard Jewel and Steven Hatfill.
Lots of little slipups here!
But those errors are correctible. After we go ahead and kill someone, there’s no do-over. There’s nothing more final than death.
I found Admiral Blair’s revelation so troubling that I consulted some of the country’s most respected Constitutional scholars to see if I was missing something.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t. As Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told me, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
He said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars’. The Bush Administration reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a "dirty war" around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.”
And where is the outrage? Mostly, it isn’t. Our elected officials are driven by fear or actively trying to drive us with fear, or both. And we who elected them are busy being terrified and looking the other way while we try to find jobs and pay the mortgage and feed the kids.
But even in good times, we Americans are not the best-informed citizens. We are far more likely to rail inchoately against “government interference” in our lives. Witness the tea-baggers.
Well, doesn’t it seem to you that killing American citizens represents a tad more than “interference” in our lives? Surely the killed would think so.
Maybe people just think Barack Obama would never, ever order any American citizen targeted and killed. Even if that were true – and we don’t know that – we ought at least to be worried about Obama’s successors.
Suppose it’s a Dick Nixon? Or a George W. Bush? The powers Obama enjoys today will be used – and likely misused – by others later on. And we can’t know what champions of The Imperial Presidency will emerge in our uncertain future.
Some of us thought George Bush should be impeached for eavesdropping on our phone calls and emails without a court order. That violated our Fourth Amendment right to be free from illegal searches. That was about our privacy; this is about our murder!
And collectively we all decide to go to the mall!
Our silence keeps reminding me of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s 1946 speech, in which he famously said,
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Friday, February 05, 2010
Attention: American Citizens
By William Fisher
Civil liberties advocates and legal authorities struck back today at what they describe as the “deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is."
In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.
The American Civil Liberties Union is among those who expressed serious concern about the lack of public information about the policy and the potential for abuse of unchecked executive power.
Attorney George Brent Mickum, who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told IPS, "I guess my sense is that it's just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don't need to offer any justification. We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives. And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives.”
He added, “My clients Bisher al Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, abu Zubaydah, and Shaker Aamer all are alleged to have been operatives based on intel. In every case that intel was incorrect. I don't have any expectation that our intel with respect to alleged American operatives is likely to be any better."
Another Constitutional scholar, Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told IPS, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
He said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars’. The Bush Administration reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a "dirty war" around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.”
The human rights advocacy community was equally forceful in its pushback. Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told IPS, “The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn't relevant. But just being a ‘suspected terrorist’ doesn't necessarily mean they're a combatant.”
She added, “The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is ‘directly participating in hostilities’. If not, and they're targeted, it's a war crime.”
And Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, said told IPS, “As with its embrace of the Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration’s even greater reliance on targeted extra-judicial killing (including of US citizens) is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake.”
“Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty, this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of US citizens (including but not limited to the Fourth Amendment right to be ‘secure in their persons’ and the Fifth Amendment right not to be ‘deprived of life . . . without due process of law’)” he said.
He added, “The US government and judiciary has historically and rightly condemned such acts – sometimes explicitly as acts of terrorism -- when conducted by governments ranging from Israel to Iran, Chile, Cuba, and Libya; it is even more damnable when perpetuated by the US government itself today. This is another attempt to sidestep constitutional and human rights (as well as the usual laws of war as to target and proportionate means) by blurring those questions in the fog of the so-called ‘global war on terror.’ Citizens should protest and Congress should act to condemn such actions.”
Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said,
"It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'
Testifying before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Blair said, "We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community." He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with "specific permission" from higher up.
In response to questions from the panel's top Republican, Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Blair said, if "we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
Blair's remarks followed a Washington Post article reporting that US President Barack Obama had embraced predecessor George W. Bush's policy of authorizing the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.
The Post reported that "After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, (President George W.) Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for example, has to pose 'a continuing and imminent threat’ to U.S. persons and interests.”
The Obama administration appears to have adopted exactly the same policy as its predecessor.
The Post, citing anonymous US officials, said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command have three Americans on their lists of specific people targeted for killing or capture.
Blair said he was offering such unusually detailed information in public because "I just don't want other Americans who are watching to think that we are careless."
Blair didn't specifically articulate the standards he used, saying only that "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans."
Hoekstra cited an incident in 2001 in which Peru's air force shot down a plane carrying US missionaries, killing a woman and her seven-month-old daughter, after the aircraft was misidentified as a drug-smuggler.
"We were careless and we were reckless," Blair replied. "I want to make sure that this committee does everything that it can and within its power that it does not allow the community to be reckless and careless again."
The Washington Post story, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest, revealed that, “In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.”
The article says, “Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.”
Civil liberties advocates and legal authorities struck back today at what they describe as the “deliberate targeted killing of American citizens far away from any active hostilities, as long as the executive branch determines unilaterally that they meet a secret definition of who the enemy is."
In an admission that took the intelligence community and its critics by surprise, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a congressional hearing Wednesday that the U.S. may, with executive approval, deliberately target and kill U.S. citizens who are suspected of being involved in terrorism.
The American Civil Liberties Union is among those who expressed serious concern about the lack of public information about the policy and the potential for abuse of unchecked executive power.
Attorney George Brent Mickum, who has defended a number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, told IPS, "I guess my sense is that it's just more fear mongering. They kill somebody and don't need to offer any justification. We have killed thousands of innocent civilians while attempting to target alleged operatives. And let us not forget how frequently our intelligence has been wrong about alleged operatives.”
He added, “My clients Bisher al Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Martin Mubanga, abu Zubaydah, and Shaker Aamer all are alleged to have been operatives based on intel. In every case that intel was incorrect. I don't have any expectation that our intel with respect to alleged American operatives is likely to be any better."
Another Constitutional scholar, Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School, told IPS, “This extrajudicial execution of human beings constitutes a grave violation of international human rights law and, under certain circumstances, can also constitute a war crime under the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949. In addition, the extrajudicial execution of U.S. citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
He said, “The U.S. Government has now established a ‘death list’ for U.S. citizens abroad akin to those established by Latin American dictatorships during their so-called ‘dirty wars’. The Bush Administration reduced the United States of America to a Banana Republic waging a "dirty war" around the world in gross violation of international law, human rights law, and the laws of war.”
The human rights advocacy community was equally forceful in its pushback. Daphne Eviatar, an attorney with Human Rights First, told IPS, “The short answer is that combatants can be targeted and civilians cannot under international law. Their citizenship isn't relevant. But just being a ‘suspected terrorist’ doesn't necessarily mean they're a combatant.”
She added, “The key question, and where there may be serious disagreement, is whether the person targeted is ‘directly participating in hostilities’. If not, and they're targeted, it's a war crime.”
And Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, said told IPS, “As with its embrace of the Bush approach to indefinite detention, the Obama administration’s even greater reliance on targeted extra-judicial killing (including of US citizens) is a tragic legal, moral, and practical mistake.”
“Even for those who accept the legitimacy of the death penalty, this further undermines the rule of law that is our best weapon in the fight against true terrorists, while completely subverting due process and constitutional rights of US citizens (including but not limited to the Fourth Amendment right to be ‘secure in their persons’ and the Fifth Amendment right not to be ‘deprived of life . . . without due process of law’)” he said.
He added, “The US government and judiciary has historically and rightly condemned such acts – sometimes explicitly as acts of terrorism -- when conducted by governments ranging from Israel to Iran, Chile, Cuba, and Libya; it is even more damnable when perpetuated by the US government itself today. This is another attempt to sidestep constitutional and human rights (as well as the usual laws of war as to target and proportionate means) by blurring those questions in the fog of the so-called ‘global war on terror.’ Citizens should protest and Congress should act to condemn such actions.”
Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said,
"It is alarming to hear that the Obama administration is asserting that the president can authorize the assassination of Americans abroad, even if they are far from any battlefield and may have never taken up arms against the U.S., but have only been deemed to constitute an unspecified 'threat.'
Testifying before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Blair said, "We take direct action against terrorists in the intelligence community." He said US counter-terrorism officials may try to kill American citizens embroiled in extremist groups overseas with "specific permission" from higher up.
In response to questions from the panel's top Republican, Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Blair said, if "we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that."
Blair's remarks followed a Washington Post article reporting that US President Barack Obama had embraced predecessor George W. Bush's policy of authorizing the killing of US citizens involved in terrorist activities overseas.
The Post reported that "After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, (President George W.) Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for example, has to pose 'a continuing and imminent threat’ to U.S. persons and interests.”
The Obama administration appears to have adopted exactly the same policy as its predecessor.
The Post, citing anonymous US officials, said the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Joint Special Operations Command have three Americans on their lists of specific people targeted for killing or capture.
Blair said he was offering such unusually detailed information in public because "I just don't want other Americans who are watching to think that we are careless."
Blair didn't specifically articulate the standards he used, saying only that "We don't target people for free speech. We target them for taking action that threatens Americans."
Hoekstra cited an incident in 2001 in which Peru's air force shot down a plane carrying US missionaries, killing a woman and her seven-month-old daughter, after the aircraft was misidentified as a drug-smuggler.
"We were careless and we were reckless," Blair replied. "I want to make sure that this committee does everything that it can and within its power that it does not allow the community to be reckless and careless again."
The Washington Post story, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Dana Priest, revealed that, “In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.”
The article says, “Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.”
Monday, February 01, 2010
Haiti After the Cleanup!
By William Fisher
In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, prominent advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. and the international community to reverse decades of racial and political discrimination and build relief and reconstruction efforts on human rights principles, transparency, and respect for the dignity of all Haitians.
The director of one of the groups, Monika Kalra Varma, Director of the RFK Center for Human Rights, told IPS, “Over the years, help for Haiti has been shaped by ideological politics and broken promises.”
She charged that, “Generally the international community has made pledges to Haiti and not fulfilled them. Donor states have human rights obligations in Haiti as well -they must do no harm. When states pledge funds to Haiti which the Haitian people and government rely on in figuring out how to meet the needs of its people, particularly when you're talking about monetary pledges to strengthen water, education, and health systems and that money doesn't come in, the donors have violated their human rights obligations.”
Some development experts who have worked in Haiti for years have talked with IPS on condition of anonymity because they have friends and family members involved in the relief effort. They say that “There have been hundreds of millions of dollars in development assistance that has gone to benefit Haiti’s elites -- government, business and the military – at the expense of the country’s common people.”
“These elites have abused international aid, and have done nothing to create an education system, a public health system or any meaningful infrastructure,“ they say.
They add that racial politics has always played a significant role in Haiti’s history. Haitian elites “tend to have lighter skin color than their darker-skin brothers and sisters who make up the vast majority of Haitians,” they say.
They note that at one point in its storied history, Haiti was divided into separate sections for lighter and darker-skin citizens. In 1806, Haiti consisted of a black-controlled north and a mulatto-ruled south. That was a mere five years after a former black slave, Toussaint Louverture, became a guerrilla leader and overthrew French rule, abolished slavery and proclaimed himself governor-general of an autonomous government. For decades afterward, Haiti was crippled by reparations it was forced to pay to former slaveowners.
Another Haiti expert, Prof. Robert Maguire of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., told IPS that the history of aid to Haiti has been a complex combination of corruption among the government and business elites of the country and the selfish interests of private sector international investors who “wanted to maintain the status quo” and who viewed Haiti only as “a low-wage and stable distatorship” able to manufacture basic garments and other textile products.
He is proposing a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth, who he calls the wellspring of creativity, talent and potential.”
“A civic service corps would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince and into work. They could start with the once-iconic center of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti's countryside,” said Maguire, who is an advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Eric Michael Johnson, a post-grad student at the University of British Columbia, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that “Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries.”
“Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are proposing an even larger program following the same mode,” he says.
Johnson writes that “since 2004 Haitian exports to the United States increased by 32%while, during the same period, the Haitian minimum wage declined by 36%. “
The Kennedy Center’s Kalra Varma noted that multilateral aid has frequently been marked by stop-start-stop politics, with aid stopping when Haiti elects a leader not favored by donors. She cites the refusal of the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) to release funds earmarked for water projects, which would have benefited the poor. “The IDB is controlled by its largest donor, the U.S. and the U.S. did not like Haiti’s government of the day,” she said.
She added, “All too often, aid has been slow to arrive, uncoordinated, and planned with no input from the people most affected -- that legacy must and can end today. We have an opportunity to break with the past and ensure that assistance is given in a way that strengthens Haitians’ fundamental rights to food, water, and health. The Haitian people deserve no less.”
The other groups include the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante, and TransAfrica Forum.
Loune Viaud, Director of Strategic Planning and Operations at Zanmi Lasante, a health organization, cautioned, “The only way to avoid escalation of this crisis is for international aid to take a long-term view and strive to rebuild a stronger Haiti—one that includes a government that can ensure the basic human rights of all Haitians and a nation that is empowered to demand those rights.”
The groups cited past relief efforts in Haiti that were uncoordinated, unpredictable, and lacked community participation, often leading to increased suffering. They called on the international community to seize on this opportunity to advance human rights and sustainability in the ravaged country.
“The magnitude of the catastrophe is not entirely a result of natural disaster but rather, a history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment of the Haitian people through a series of misguided polices,” said Brian Concannon Jr., Director of IJDH. “Lack of donor accountability and continued aid volatility will only guarantee even greater suffering.”
In an editorial prepared for distribution, Kalra Varma and Kerry Kennedy, wrote, “ As international aid begins to pour into Haiti, we have a brief moment to break with past mistakes and bring real change to Haiti.” U.S and international aid efforts “could be characterized, at best, as unsustainable and, at worst, deliberately harmful,” they wrote. Kerry Kennedy is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.
The editorial continues, “In 2000, the U.S. and the Inter-American Development Bank approved millions of dollars of what would have been lifesaving loans for improvements to water, health, education, and road infrastructure, only to later withhold these funds because they opposed then President Aristide. While the loans were eventually released, the communities where the very first water projects were to be financed still lack access, ten years later, to reliably clean drinking water, contributing to countless deaths due to waterborne illness.”
It adds, “In 2004, the international community pledged $1 billion to support Haiti. The RFK Center, along with the health organization Zanmi Lasante and the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, tried to track the fulfillment of those pledges, but never received clear and consistent answers from donor states on the status of the aid. With no transparency or coordinating body to turn to, the Haitian people had no hope of knowing if that money ever got to Haiti, much less where it was directed and how it could be used to improve their communities. Haitian government sources later confirmed that most of the pledges had never been fulfilled.”
In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, prominent advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. and the international community to reverse decades of racial and political discrimination and build relief and reconstruction efforts on human rights principles, transparency, and respect for the dignity of all Haitians.
The director of one of the groups, Monika Kalra Varma, Director of the RFK Center for Human Rights, told IPS, “Over the years, help for Haiti has been shaped by ideological politics and broken promises.”
She charged that, “Generally the international community has made pledges to Haiti and not fulfilled them. Donor states have human rights obligations in Haiti as well -they must do no harm. When states pledge funds to Haiti which the Haitian people and government rely on in figuring out how to meet the needs of its people, particularly when you're talking about monetary pledges to strengthen water, education, and health systems and that money doesn't come in, the donors have violated their human rights obligations.”
Some development experts who have worked in Haiti for years have talked with IPS on condition of anonymity because they have friends and family members involved in the relief effort. They say that “There have been hundreds of millions of dollars in development assistance that has gone to benefit Haiti’s elites -- government, business and the military – at the expense of the country’s common people.”
“These elites have abused international aid, and have done nothing to create an education system, a public health system or any meaningful infrastructure,“ they say.
They add that racial politics has always played a significant role in Haiti’s history. Haitian elites “tend to have lighter skin color than their darker-skin brothers and sisters who make up the vast majority of Haitians,” they say.
They note that at one point in its storied history, Haiti was divided into separate sections for lighter and darker-skin citizens. In 1806, Haiti consisted of a black-controlled north and a mulatto-ruled south. That was a mere five years after a former black slave, Toussaint Louverture, became a guerrilla leader and overthrew French rule, abolished slavery and proclaimed himself governor-general of an autonomous government. For decades afterward, Haiti was crippled by reparations it was forced to pay to former slaveowners.
Another Haiti expert, Prof. Robert Maguire of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., told IPS that the history of aid to Haiti has been a complex combination of corruption among the government and business elites of the country and the selfish interests of private sector international investors who “wanted to maintain the status quo” and who viewed Haiti only as “a low-wage and stable distatorship” able to manufacture basic garments and other textile products.
He is proposing a 700,000-strong national civic service corps made up of Haitian youth, who he calls the wellspring of creativity, talent and potential.”
“A civic service corps would get the young and able out of the tent cities in and around Port-au-Prince and into work. They could start with the once-iconic center of the capital, but also could begin planting trees, working the fields and providing services in Haiti's countryside,” said Maguire, who is an advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Eric Michael Johnson, a post-grad student at the University of British Columbia, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that “Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries.”
“Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are proposing an even larger program following the same mode,” he says.
Johnson writes that “since 2004 Haitian exports to the United States increased by 32%while, during the same period, the Haitian minimum wage declined by 36%. “
The Kennedy Center’s Kalra Varma noted that multilateral aid has frequently been marked by stop-start-stop politics, with aid stopping when Haiti elects a leader not favored by donors. She cites the refusal of the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) to release funds earmarked for water projects, which would have benefited the poor. “The IDB is controlled by its largest donor, the U.S. and the U.S. did not like Haiti’s government of the day,” she said.
She added, “All too often, aid has been slow to arrive, uncoordinated, and planned with no input from the people most affected -- that legacy must and can end today. We have an opportunity to break with the past and ensure that assistance is given in a way that strengthens Haitians’ fundamental rights to food, water, and health. The Haitian people deserve no less.”
The other groups include the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), Partners In Health/Zanmi Lasante, and TransAfrica Forum.
Loune Viaud, Director of Strategic Planning and Operations at Zanmi Lasante, a health organization, cautioned, “The only way to avoid escalation of this crisis is for international aid to take a long-term view and strive to rebuild a stronger Haiti—one that includes a government that can ensure the basic human rights of all Haitians and a nation that is empowered to demand those rights.”
The groups cited past relief efforts in Haiti that were uncoordinated, unpredictable, and lacked community participation, often leading to increased suffering. They called on the international community to seize on this opportunity to advance human rights and sustainability in the ravaged country.
“The magnitude of the catastrophe is not entirely a result of natural disaster but rather, a history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment of the Haitian people through a series of misguided polices,” said Brian Concannon Jr., Director of IJDH. “Lack of donor accountability and continued aid volatility will only guarantee even greater suffering.”
In an editorial prepared for distribution, Kalra Varma and Kerry Kennedy, wrote, “ As international aid begins to pour into Haiti, we have a brief moment to break with past mistakes and bring real change to Haiti.” U.S and international aid efforts “could be characterized, at best, as unsustainable and, at worst, deliberately harmful,” they wrote. Kerry Kennedy is the daughter of Robert F. Kennedy.
The editorial continues, “In 2000, the U.S. and the Inter-American Development Bank approved millions of dollars of what would have been lifesaving loans for improvements to water, health, education, and road infrastructure, only to later withhold these funds because they opposed then President Aristide. While the loans were eventually released, the communities where the very first water projects were to be financed still lack access, ten years later, to reliably clean drinking water, contributing to countless deaths due to waterborne illness.”
It adds, “In 2004, the international community pledged $1 billion to support Haiti. The RFK Center, along with the health organization Zanmi Lasante and the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, tried to track the fulfillment of those pledges, but never received clear and consistent answers from donor states on the status of the aid. With no transparency or coordinating body to turn to, the Haitian people had no hope of knowing if that money ever got to Haiti, much less where it was directed and how it could be used to improve their communities. Haitian government sources later confirmed that most of the pledges had never been fulfilled.”
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Those Pesky Drones!
By William Fisher
The Obama Administration is ramping up its use of drone unmanned aircraft to execute targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps in other locations – and in the process killing civilians along with insurgents and risking the compromise of US moral imperatives and foreign policy goals.
That’s the view of a leading civil rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) calling on the president to lift the curtain of secrecy and level with the American people.
The increase comes on the heels of the “double-agent” attack on a CIA forward base camp in Afghanistan earlier this month that killed seven central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel. The CIA was reportedly working with a Jordanian who they thought was infiltrating Al Qaeda on their behalf. But when he arrived at their camp, he detonated a bomb, killing himself and seven others.
The ACLU is asking the government to release basic information about its use of drones to execute targeted killings. The group believes that “the use and proliferation of this tactic must be the subject of public scrutiny and debate.” The strikes are reportedly being carried out both by U.S. military forces and the CIA.
The request is seeking information, including who may be targeted and the geographical limits on where drone strikes may occur. It wants information about the scope and consequences of drone strikes, including a breakdown of the total number of people killed, the civilian casualty toll and the number of people killed who were fighters with the Afghan Taliban, or al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or who had some other terror-related affiliation or status.
“The public has been kept in the dark and is therefore unable to assess the wisdom or legality of the strikes,” the group claims.
"The use of drones to conduct targeted killings raises complicated questions – not just legal questions but policy and moral questions as well. These are not questions that should be decided behind closed doors. They are questions that should be debated openly, and the public should have access to information that would allow it to participate meaningfully in the debate," according to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
One of the unmanned vehicles, known as the Predator, is capable of flying, armed or unarmed, for hours remotely controlled by pilots who are stationed thousands of miles away. The Predator is part of a growing number of similar craft that includes the Reaper and Raven as well as a new, high-tech video sensor system called the Gorgon Stare, which is being installed on Reapers.
The ACLU charges that the Obama administration has stepped up the use of drones to target individuals not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and perhaps other countries that are not active theaters of war.
“The use of unmanned drones to target and kill individuals is a profoundly new way of waging war. For the first time, military and intelligence officers can observe, track, and launch missiles at targeted individuals from control centers located thousands of miles away, without any significant U.S. presence on the ground. The technology also permits the United States to target individuals nearly anywhere in the world,” the organization claims.
The number of civilian casualties caused by drone attacks varies from the dozens to the hundreds. Human rights organizations are particularly concerned that drones could be used to target criminal suspects rather than legitimate military targets. Criminal suspects should be arrested and tried in civilian courts, the ACLU contends, adding that failure to do so could amount to “unlawful extrajudicial killings.”
The ACLU also raised concerns about the wisdom of using drones on policy and moral grounds.
“We hope that the Obama administration will live up to its professed commitments to transparency and openness in government and release this essential information in a timely manner,” the group said.
The increasing use of drones by the US has drawn sharp criticism from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and other high Pakistani officials.
Pakistan says the strikes against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban militants along its northwest violate its sovereignty. The attacks have resulted in serious anti-American feelings in Pakistan, which Washington sees as a critical ally in its war on extremism.
Gilani has told the press that drone attacks carried out on Pakistani soil were “counter-productive.” He said, “If the drone attacks had been useful, then we would have ourselves supported them.”
Gilani said the militants in the northwestern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are strengthened by U.S. missile strikes. “Our policy is to isolate militants from the local tribes, but drone attacks unite them,” he said.
His view was echoed by Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who told Reuters that intensified U.S. drone aircraft attacks against Islamist militants in Pakistan could endanger relations between the two allies.
But when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, she told a news conference the US was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Pakistan in its military offensive. And the increased use of unmanned Predator drones is one of the highest-profile ways the US is doing that.
The White House authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s tribal areas to parallel the president’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The Anew York Times reports that American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — “a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”
US strategy for eliminating safe havens for militants in the region turns on
increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan while ground forces attempt to reverse the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan.
Investigative reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine has revealed that the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan has risen dramatically under President Obama. During his first 9.5 months in office, Obama authorized at least forty-one CIA missile strikes in Pakistan, a rate of approximately one bombing a week. President Bush sanctioned approximately the same number of attacks in his final three years in office.
The attacks have killed between 326 and 538 people, according to Mayer. She writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official US policy.”
One of the most high-profile critics of the US drone program has been the United Nations human rights envoy, Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions.
Alston told Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program that the US government’s use of Predator drones may violate international law. He also raised the issue in a report to the UN General Assembly’s Human Rights Committee and said the US should explain the legal basis for using unmanned drones for targeted killings.
In June, Alston presented a critical report on the drone program to the UN Human Rights Council, but he says US representatives ignored his concerns.
He says, “If you’re a Defense Department person, it’s a very attractive proposition. One can use the Predators without putting US servicemen in any harm. They are very effective. They can kill very significant numbers of people.”
But, he adds, “The problem is that we have no real information on this program. What Jane Mayer exposed in her New Yorker piece is probably the most detailed information we have. She herself said that the CIA provides no information. It’s extraordinary that it’s the Central Intelligence Agency which is actually operating a missile program, which is actually deciding who to kill, when and where.”
Alston added, “There’s no accountability for it. There’s no indication of the rules that they use. So, I said before, there are rules, that it’s possible to justify a particular killing, but the CIA has never tried to do that. They have simply issued a general assurance: ‘No, no, everything’s fine. We really follow the rules, and we’re very careful.’ Well, if Israel or some other country that we’re scrutinizing says that, we say, ‘Sorry, guys, it’s not enough. We need to get the details’.”
Alston has called on the American government to make clear the details of the program; the legal basis, under US law, on which they are relying; the rules that they have put in place which govern the CIA actions, assuming there are rules; and what sort of accountability mechanisms they have. Do they review what they’ve done? They identify an individual. Often these identifications are very vague. But they say, ‘OK, we’ve got X in our sights’. Did they actually kill X? Did they kill someone else? How many other civilians did they kill? There’s never any accounting of that. And we need that sort of retrospective analysis, as well.”
He adds that, in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, “The United States has not done nearly enough, even today, to make sure that private military contractors do not carry out virtually all tasks, including, it seems, running a part of the drone program.”
But the drone program also has its fans. One of them is John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel deputy who wrote the so-called “torture memos. ” Yoo appeared at the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently.
He said that in some areas, President Obama has gone beyond George W. Bush when it comes to the use of executive power. Yoo pointed towards the Obama administration’s increased use of predator drones overseas as an example.
“If we were still in peacetime, and this were the criminal justice system, police are not allowed to shoot missiles at people who might be criminals, might be about to commit a criminal act or might have committed a criminal act, even if we have a hard time finding and arresting them,” said Yoo. He added that in this area Obama has gone beyond Bush.
He said figuring out how to target terrorists is much more difficult because they do not wear uniforms or have territories. “It’s a complicated process that we had not had to think about before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a war.”
Two leading U.S. senators are also strong supporters of the drone program. They are Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut. Their recent visit to Islamabad underscored tensions between the anti-terrorist allies caused by strikes unmanned aircraft strikes against suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.
"Friends don't always agree on every issue," Sen. McCain said at a news conference in Islamabad, adding that the United States will "try to find common ground" with Pakistani leaders on the drone issue but that "we have to do everything we feel is necessary to protect Americans from the attacks of terrorists who may be based here."
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari asked the senators to seek a halt to the drone attacks. He said they are undermining domestic support for the war against Islamist militants and asked that the United States give Pakistan the technology to carry out such strikes on its own.
Following the Dec. 30 suicide bombing at a US base in eastern Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers and contractors, Washington has also increased its use of the controversial strikes near the Afghan border. Suspected US missiles killed four people and injured three in the latest raid on the North Waziristan tribal area. That was the sixth attack in the region in a week, the Associated Press reported. The AP quoted two Pakistani intelligence officials, who said a pair of missiles struck a house and a vehicle in a village near the town of Miran Shah. They did not identify the victims.
It is the civilian deaths that are giving US policy-makers serious headaches. The strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley McChrystal – and supported by Obama with the deployment of 30,000 additional troops – centers on protecting the Afghan people. It is unclear how killing civilians with drone attacks furthers that goal.
In a related development, military observers have revealed – and their revelations have been confirmed by the U.S. military – that a new, “stealthy” US drone, nicknamed “The Beast”, is operating out of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
But they question what it’s doing there. One military website wrote, “Since the Taliban do not have radar, why deploy an expensive, stealthy drone when conventional models like the Predator and Reaper work so well? And what’s the point of having a high-level, strategic craft in that theater?”
It says the speculation is that “The Beast” may be carrying out missions outside of Afghanistan, with Iran and Pakistan both being possible candidates.
The Air Force has confirmed “The Beast’s” existence to Aviation Week magazine. “Officially, it’s an RQ-170 Sentinel, developed by Lockheed and flown by the flown by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range in Nevada,” the magazine reported.
And, in something of an embarrassment for the US military, The New York Times reported that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones, a key weapon in a Pentagon spy system that serves as the military’s eyes in the sky for surveillance and intelligence collection.
Though militants could see the video, The Times said there is no evidence they were able to jam the electronic signals from the unmanned aerial craft or take control of the vehicles, according to a senior defense official speaking on condition of anonymity.
Obtaining the video feeds can provide insurgents with critical information about what the military may be targeting, including buildings, roads and other facilities. The military has reportedly known about the vulnerability for more than a decade, but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it.
The Obama Administration is ramping up its use of drone unmanned aircraft to execute targeted killings in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and perhaps in other locations – and in the process killing civilians along with insurgents and risking the compromise of US moral imperatives and foreign policy goals.
That’s the view of a leading civil rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) calling on the president to lift the curtain of secrecy and level with the American people.
The increase comes on the heels of the “double-agent” attack on a CIA forward base camp in Afghanistan earlier this month that killed seven central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel. The CIA was reportedly working with a Jordanian who they thought was infiltrating Al Qaeda on their behalf. But when he arrived at their camp, he detonated a bomb, killing himself and seven others.
The ACLU is asking the government to release basic information about its use of drones to execute targeted killings. The group believes that “the use and proliferation of this tactic must be the subject of public scrutiny and debate.” The strikes are reportedly being carried out both by U.S. military forces and the CIA.
The request is seeking information, including who may be targeted and the geographical limits on where drone strikes may occur. It wants information about the scope and consequences of drone strikes, including a breakdown of the total number of people killed, the civilian casualty toll and the number of people killed who were fighters with the Afghan Taliban, or al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or who had some other terror-related affiliation or status.
“The public has been kept in the dark and is therefore unable to assess the wisdom or legality of the strikes,” the group claims.
"The use of drones to conduct targeted killings raises complicated questions – not just legal questions but policy and moral questions as well. These are not questions that should be decided behind closed doors. They are questions that should be debated openly, and the public should have access to information that would allow it to participate meaningfully in the debate," according to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.
One of the unmanned vehicles, known as the Predator, is capable of flying, armed or unarmed, for hours remotely controlled by pilots who are stationed thousands of miles away. The Predator is part of a growing number of similar craft that includes the Reaper and Raven as well as a new, high-tech video sensor system called the Gorgon Stare, which is being installed on Reapers.
The ACLU charges that the Obama administration has stepped up the use of drones to target individuals not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and perhaps other countries that are not active theaters of war.
“The use of unmanned drones to target and kill individuals is a profoundly new way of waging war. For the first time, military and intelligence officers can observe, track, and launch missiles at targeted individuals from control centers located thousands of miles away, without any significant U.S. presence on the ground. The technology also permits the United States to target individuals nearly anywhere in the world,” the organization claims.
The number of civilian casualties caused by drone attacks varies from the dozens to the hundreds. Human rights organizations are particularly concerned that drones could be used to target criminal suspects rather than legitimate military targets. Criminal suspects should be arrested and tried in civilian courts, the ACLU contends, adding that failure to do so could amount to “unlawful extrajudicial killings.”
The ACLU also raised concerns about the wisdom of using drones on policy and moral grounds.
“We hope that the Obama administration will live up to its professed commitments to transparency and openness in government and release this essential information in a timely manner,” the group said.
The increasing use of drones by the US has drawn sharp criticism from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and other high Pakistani officials.
Pakistan says the strikes against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban militants along its northwest violate its sovereignty. The attacks have resulted in serious anti-American feelings in Pakistan, which Washington sees as a critical ally in its war on extremism.
Gilani has told the press that drone attacks carried out on Pakistani soil were “counter-productive.” He said, “If the drone attacks had been useful, then we would have ourselves supported them.”
Gilani said the militants in the northwestern tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are strengthened by U.S. missile strikes. “Our policy is to isolate militants from the local tribes, but drone attacks unite them,” he said.
His view was echoed by Pakistan's foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who told Reuters that intensified U.S. drone aircraft attacks against Islamist militants in Pakistan could endanger relations between the two allies.
But when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, she told a news conference the US was standing “shoulder to shoulder” with Pakistan in its military offensive. And the increased use of unmanned Predator drones is one of the highest-profile ways the US is doing that.
The White House authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s tribal areas to parallel the president’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. The Anew York Times reports that American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — “a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”
US strategy for eliminating safe havens for militants in the region turns on
increasing covert pressure on Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan while ground forces attempt to reverse the Taliban’s advances in Afghanistan.
Investigative reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine has revealed that the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan has risen dramatically under President Obama. During his first 9.5 months in office, Obama authorized at least forty-one CIA missile strikes in Pakistan, a rate of approximately one bombing a week. President Bush sanctioned approximately the same number of attacks in his final three years in office.
The attacks have killed between 326 and 538 people, according to Mayer. She writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official US policy.”
One of the most high-profile critics of the US drone program has been the United Nations human rights envoy, Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions.
Alston told Amy Goodman of the Democracy Now radio program that the US government’s use of Predator drones may violate international law. He also raised the issue in a report to the UN General Assembly’s Human Rights Committee and said the US should explain the legal basis for using unmanned drones for targeted killings.
In June, Alston presented a critical report on the drone program to the UN Human Rights Council, but he says US representatives ignored his concerns.
He says, “If you’re a Defense Department person, it’s a very attractive proposition. One can use the Predators without putting US servicemen in any harm. They are very effective. They can kill very significant numbers of people.”
But, he adds, “The problem is that we have no real information on this program. What Jane Mayer exposed in her New Yorker piece is probably the most detailed information we have. She herself said that the CIA provides no information. It’s extraordinary that it’s the Central Intelligence Agency which is actually operating a missile program, which is actually deciding who to kill, when and where.”
Alston added, “There’s no accountability for it. There’s no indication of the rules that they use. So, I said before, there are rules, that it’s possible to justify a particular killing, but the CIA has never tried to do that. They have simply issued a general assurance: ‘No, no, everything’s fine. We really follow the rules, and we’re very careful.’ Well, if Israel or some other country that we’re scrutinizing says that, we say, ‘Sorry, guys, it’s not enough. We need to get the details’.”
Alston has called on the American government to make clear the details of the program; the legal basis, under US law, on which they are relying; the rules that they have put in place which govern the CIA actions, assuming there are rules; and what sort of accountability mechanisms they have. Do they review what they’ve done? They identify an individual. Often these identifications are very vague. But they say, ‘OK, we’ve got X in our sights’. Did they actually kill X? Did they kill someone else? How many other civilians did they kill? There’s never any accounting of that. And we need that sort of retrospective analysis, as well.”
He adds that, in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, “The United States has not done nearly enough, even today, to make sure that private military contractors do not carry out virtually all tasks, including, it seems, running a part of the drone program.”
But the drone program also has its fans. One of them is John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel deputy who wrote the so-called “torture memos. ” Yoo appeared at the conservative American Enterprise Institute recently.
He said that in some areas, President Obama has gone beyond George W. Bush when it comes to the use of executive power. Yoo pointed towards the Obama administration’s increased use of predator drones overseas as an example.
“If we were still in peacetime, and this were the criminal justice system, police are not allowed to shoot missiles at people who might be criminals, might be about to commit a criminal act or might have committed a criminal act, even if we have a hard time finding and arresting them,” said Yoo. He added that in this area Obama has gone beyond Bush.
He said figuring out how to target terrorists is much more difficult because they do not wear uniforms or have territories. “It’s a complicated process that we had not had to think about before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a war.”
Two leading U.S. senators are also strong supporters of the drone program. They are Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut. Their recent visit to Islamabad underscored tensions between the anti-terrorist allies caused by strikes unmanned aircraft strikes against suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda targets.
"Friends don't always agree on every issue," Sen. McCain said at a news conference in Islamabad, adding that the United States will "try to find common ground" with Pakistani leaders on the drone issue but that "we have to do everything we feel is necessary to protect Americans from the attacks of terrorists who may be based here."
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari asked the senators to seek a halt to the drone attacks. He said they are undermining domestic support for the war against Islamist militants and asked that the United States give Pakistan the technology to carry out such strikes on its own.
Following the Dec. 30 suicide bombing at a US base in eastern Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers and contractors, Washington has also increased its use of the controversial strikes near the Afghan border. Suspected US missiles killed four people and injured three in the latest raid on the North Waziristan tribal area. That was the sixth attack in the region in a week, the Associated Press reported. The AP quoted two Pakistani intelligence officials, who said a pair of missiles struck a house and a vehicle in a village near the town of Miran Shah. They did not identify the victims.
It is the civilian deaths that are giving US policy-makers serious headaches. The strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley McChrystal – and supported by Obama with the deployment of 30,000 additional troops – centers on protecting the Afghan people. It is unclear how killing civilians with drone attacks furthers that goal.
In a related development, military observers have revealed – and their revelations have been confirmed by the U.S. military – that a new, “stealthy” US drone, nicknamed “The Beast”, is operating out of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
But they question what it’s doing there. One military website wrote, “Since the Taliban do not have radar, why deploy an expensive, stealthy drone when conventional models like the Predator and Reaper work so well? And what’s the point of having a high-level, strategic craft in that theater?”
It says the speculation is that “The Beast” may be carrying out missions outside of Afghanistan, with Iran and Pakistan both being possible candidates.
The Air Force has confirmed “The Beast’s” existence to Aviation Week magazine. “Officially, it’s an RQ-170 Sentinel, developed by Lockheed and flown by the flown by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range in Nevada,” the magazine reported.
And, in something of an embarrassment for the US military, The New York Times reported that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have hacked into live video feeds from Predator drones, a key weapon in a Pentagon spy system that serves as the military’s eyes in the sky for surveillance and intelligence collection.
Though militants could see the video, The Times said there is no evidence they were able to jam the electronic signals from the unmanned aerial craft or take control of the vehicles, according to a senior defense official speaking on condition of anonymity.
Obtaining the video feeds can provide insurgents with critical information about what the military may be targeting, including buildings, roads and other facilities. The military has reportedly known about the vulnerability for more than a decade, but assumed adversaries would not be able to exploit it.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Obama and the Banks
By William Fisher
On the heels of a stinging defeat in the Massachusetts Senatorial race that dealt a major blow to passage of health care legislation, President Obama abruptly pivoted yesterday to change the subject to the state of the U.S. economy and to back sweeping regulatory reforms on “too big to fail” banks.
The president noted that it was those “too big to fail” banks that brought the U.S. financial system to the brink of total collapse a year ago by taking “reckless risks” to generate profits and bonuses.
Clearly struggling to channel the populist anger sweeping the country, he proposed legislation that would govern how big the big banks can become and what lines of business they would be permitted or forbidden to run.
Bank holding companies – which include the major commercial and investment banks – would be prohibited from engaging in the hedge fund or private equity fund fields.
The legislation Obama outlined would also seek to place limits on industry consolidation. It would achieve this by curbing the growth of the market share of liabilities at the biggest firms. The New York Times reported that an existing cap, put in place in 1994, put a limit of 10 percent on the share of insured deposits that can be held by any one bank. That cap would be expanded to include liabilities other than deposits.
Bank Holding Companies would also be barred from proprietary trading – using bank funds to invest on behalf of their own accounts, often resulting in banks taking investment positions against the interests of their shareholders.
Calling this “the Volcker Rule,” the president said commercial banks needed to get back to their core business -- taking customers’ deposits and lending money. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker has long advocated this position.
Volker -- who reportedly fell out of favor with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, now chairman of the president’s National Economic Council -- has long championed barring commercial banks from using deposits to finance trading in financial securities such as mortgage-backed securities. The losses sustained by commercial banks active in this kind of trading is generally thought to be a major cause of the 2008 crash and subsequent taxpayer bailout.
Most of the regulatory changes Obama proposed require legislation by Congress. This will not be easy, particularly since Republicans have already telegraphed their intention to oppose change – and since, as of Tuesday, the Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
That loss came in the defeat of Democrat Martha Coakley in her quest to win the Senate seat occupied by the late Ted Kennedy for decades. Victory in the race went to Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, who bragged about being the Republicans’ 41st vote against the health care bill. He will be the 41st Republican in the senate, reducing the Democratic caucus to 59. Major legislation in the senate usually takes a super-majority of 60 votes to pass.
In a reliable poll, conducted the morning after the election, fifty-one percent of those Obama supporters backing Brown "said that Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street."
In an interview with ABC News, Obama said Americans have a "feeling of remoteness and detachment" from Washington. "I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," he said.
Last week, Obama said the American people provided "extraordinary assistance" to the financial industry and "continue to face real hardship in this recession." Yet at the same time, Wall Street is expected to dole out a record $145 billion in bonuses to its employees this year.
"Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal, or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities. And I'd urge you to cover the costs of the rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill, but by rolling back bonuses for top earners and executives," Obama said.
Predictably resisting the kinds of changes Obama proposed, the banking industry warned of its opposition. But Obama evidently anticipated that reaction. He said he expected an “army of industry lobbyists” to fight his proposals. “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” he declared.
The president also pushed the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to regulate financial products including credit cards and mortgages.
Scott E. Talbott, the chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which speaks for most of the major lenders and insurance companies, said the Obama proposals would “reduce liquidity and increase risk.” He added, “That is the direct opposite of the goals we want to achieve.”
Bank lobbyists also attacked the proposed CFPA. "Maybe the administration will decide that they want to turn this into a partisan battle but, coming out of health care, I don't think the majority of senators want to have a partisan battle," said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. "They want a bipartisan bill."
But Harvard law school professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts, has said that without the CFPA, "the tag on U.S. financial regulation reform may as well say 'Made on Wall Street'" and is "the best indicator of whether Congress will reform Wall Street or whether it will continue to give Wall Street whatever it wants."
And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman proposed “a simple solution” for passing CFPA and other financial reforms: Make Republicans (or Democrats) vote against it. "Expose the hollowness of their populist posing," Krugman wrote. "In short, take on the banks -- and force those who are covering for them into the open."
But many expert observers of the current recession feel that little will be achieved in the way of financial services regulation until lobbyists’ money is removed from the political landscape.
One such observer is Dr. Jack N. Behrman, emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina business school, who served as JFK’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Domestic and International Business. He told Truthout, “No Congressional campaign funds should be permitted to or through either party organization, and lobbying should be permitted only where no funds are involved -- merely persuasion. PLUS -- no Congressman would be allowed to become a lobbyist until four years after retirement.”
The already favorable lobbying environment for the financial sector may become even more favorable as a result of Thursday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision. The five Conservatives on the court ruled that corporations, as persons, have free speech rights. And since money is considered speech, spending limitations cannot be placed on corporations. The decision means that significant parts of the McCain-Finegold law limiting campaign contributions by corporations are unconstitutional. Corporations – including businesses, labor unions and not-for-profits – will now be free to spend as much money as they wish in support of specific candidates in Federal elections.
Anticipating reduced profitability in the financial sector, bank stocks fell sharply on Wall Street. Investors read in The Wall Street Journal that Obama’s “goal would be to deter banks from becoming so large they put the broader economy at risk and to also prevent banks from becoming so large they distort normal competitive forces."
The article above originally appeared in Truthout.org
www.truthout.org
On the heels of a stinging defeat in the Massachusetts Senatorial race that dealt a major blow to passage of health care legislation, President Obama abruptly pivoted yesterday to change the subject to the state of the U.S. economy and to back sweeping regulatory reforms on “too big to fail” banks.
The president noted that it was those “too big to fail” banks that brought the U.S. financial system to the brink of total collapse a year ago by taking “reckless risks” to generate profits and bonuses.
Clearly struggling to channel the populist anger sweeping the country, he proposed legislation that would govern how big the big banks can become and what lines of business they would be permitted or forbidden to run.
Bank holding companies – which include the major commercial and investment banks – would be prohibited from engaging in the hedge fund or private equity fund fields.
The legislation Obama outlined would also seek to place limits on industry consolidation. It would achieve this by curbing the growth of the market share of liabilities at the biggest firms. The New York Times reported that an existing cap, put in place in 1994, put a limit of 10 percent on the share of insured deposits that can be held by any one bank. That cap would be expanded to include liabilities other than deposits.
Bank Holding Companies would also be barred from proprietary trading – using bank funds to invest on behalf of their own accounts, often resulting in banks taking investment positions against the interests of their shareholders.
Calling this “the Volcker Rule,” the president said commercial banks needed to get back to their core business -- taking customers’ deposits and lending money. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker has long advocated this position.
Volker -- who reportedly fell out of favor with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, now chairman of the president’s National Economic Council -- has long championed barring commercial banks from using deposits to finance trading in financial securities such as mortgage-backed securities. The losses sustained by commercial banks active in this kind of trading is generally thought to be a major cause of the 2008 crash and subsequent taxpayer bailout.
Most of the regulatory changes Obama proposed require legislation by Congress. This will not be easy, particularly since Republicans have already telegraphed their intention to oppose change – and since, as of Tuesday, the Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
That loss came in the defeat of Democrat Martha Coakley in her quest to win the Senate seat occupied by the late Ted Kennedy for decades. Victory in the race went to Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, who bragged about being the Republicans’ 41st vote against the health care bill. He will be the 41st Republican in the senate, reducing the Democratic caucus to 59. Major legislation in the senate usually takes a super-majority of 60 votes to pass.
In a reliable poll, conducted the morning after the election, fifty-one percent of those Obama supporters backing Brown "said that Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street."
In an interview with ABC News, Obama said Americans have a "feeling of remoteness and detachment" from Washington. "I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values," he said.
Last week, Obama said the American people provided "extraordinary assistance" to the financial industry and "continue to face real hardship in this recession." Yet at the same time, Wall Street is expected to dole out a record $145 billion in bonuses to its employees this year.
"Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal, or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities. And I'd urge you to cover the costs of the rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill, but by rolling back bonuses for top earners and executives," Obama said.
Predictably resisting the kinds of changes Obama proposed, the banking industry warned of its opposition. But Obama evidently anticipated that reaction. He said he expected an “army of industry lobbyists” to fight his proposals. “If these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have,” he declared.
The president also pushed the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to regulate financial products including credit cards and mortgages.
Scott E. Talbott, the chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which speaks for most of the major lenders and insurance companies, said the Obama proposals would “reduce liquidity and increase risk.” He added, “That is the direct opposite of the goals we want to achieve.”
Bank lobbyists also attacked the proposed CFPA. "Maybe the administration will decide that they want to turn this into a partisan battle but, coming out of health care, I don't think the majority of senators want to have a partisan battle," said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. "They want a bipartisan bill."
But Harvard law school professor Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking bailouts, has said that without the CFPA, "the tag on U.S. financial regulation reform may as well say 'Made on Wall Street'" and is "the best indicator of whether Congress will reform Wall Street or whether it will continue to give Wall Street whatever it wants."
And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman proposed “a simple solution” for passing CFPA and other financial reforms: Make Republicans (or Democrats) vote against it. "Expose the hollowness of their populist posing," Krugman wrote. "In short, take on the banks -- and force those who are covering for them into the open."
But many expert observers of the current recession feel that little will be achieved in the way of financial services regulation until lobbyists’ money is removed from the political landscape.
One such observer is Dr. Jack N. Behrman, emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina business school, who served as JFK’s Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Domestic and International Business. He told Truthout, “No Congressional campaign funds should be permitted to or through either party organization, and lobbying should be permitted only where no funds are involved -- merely persuasion. PLUS -- no Congressman would be allowed to become a lobbyist until four years after retirement.”
The already favorable lobbying environment for the financial sector may become even more favorable as a result of Thursday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision. The five Conservatives on the court ruled that corporations, as persons, have free speech rights. And since money is considered speech, spending limitations cannot be placed on corporations. The decision means that significant parts of the McCain-Finegold law limiting campaign contributions by corporations are unconstitutional. Corporations – including businesses, labor unions and not-for-profits – will now be free to spend as much money as they wish in support of specific candidates in Federal elections.
Anticipating reduced profitability in the financial sector, bank stocks fell sharply on Wall Street. Investors read in The Wall Street Journal that Obama’s “goal would be to deter banks from becoming so large they put the broader economy at risk and to also prevent banks from becoming so large they distort normal competitive forces."
The article above originally appeared in Truthout.org
www.truthout.org
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