By William Fisher
Most foreign policy observers believe that the US will not only maintain its $10 billion in aid to Pakistan – regardless of which leader emerges, or how many people remain in jail under the country’s apparently indefinite “state of emergency” – but will increase it.
“The Bush Administration will choose ‘realpolitik’ over ‘democracy promotion’ so long as a single terrorist is left in the country,” according to a State Department source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“We will vehemently vow to reexamine our aid programs, urge free and fair elections, free jailed dissidents, restore the Supreme Court, and then, after some ‘respectable’ period, regress to the status quo ante.”
He added: “It’s all about maintaining ‘stability’ while working with the US to hunt down the bad guys.”
Another foreign affairs specialist, Patricia Lee Sharpe, a communications specialist with 22 years in the US Foreign Service in Asia, Africa and Latin America, agrees. “I think this will be the likely course of US policy,” she says.
Musharraf said the measures were part of the ‘war on terror’, but others believe he was merely trying to head off a Supreme Court ruling that he could not stand for reelection while continuing to head the Pakistani military.
As seen by Marjorie Cohn, a professor at the Thomas Jefferson Law School and president of the National Lawyers Guild, “Musharraf’s declaration of emergency was not aimed at fighting terrorism; it was designed to maintain Musharraf in power. It came shortly after the Supreme Court nullified the results of an election that would have preserved Musharraf’s rule. Musharraf, who has received more than $10 billion from the United States since 9/11, isn’t targeting the terrorists, but rather the judges and lawyers who use the law to challenge his unilateral power.”
Musharraf dismissed his country’s Supreme Court, placed the recently-returned opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, under house arrest, jailed hundreds of lawyers, banned peaceful public demonstrations, and released Taliban sympathizers from jail in a lopsided prisoner swap.
Over the weekend, Musharraf said he “hoped” to hold a presidential election in the next few months, but did not indicate when or whether the state of emergency would be ended. Under that decree, opposition political parties would be virtually unable to compete on anything like a level playing field.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on a Sunday television show that Musharraf made a “bad decision”, but added that now would be the wrong time for the US to abandon him. She said the US role should be to help Pakistan to get back on the road to democracy.
There are a host of reasons why Pakistan’s current difficulties are giving the White House such a major migraine. Most experts agree that without aggressive Pakistani action, the Taliban and Al Qaeda cannot be routed from the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan. And there is equal concern about Pakistani nuclear materials or weapons falling into the hands of extremists. But another factor high on the US list of concerns is the fact that President Bush has made democracy-promotion the rhetorical centerpiece of his Administration.
In last year’s State of the Union speech to Congress, the president said, "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." In his 2005 inauguration speech, he mentioned “freedom” 25 times in 20 minutes.
But now, the Administration will likely have to put democracy-promotion
on the back-burner and play the ‘realpolitik’ game. This will likely result
in the US accepting another authoritarian dictator, so long as he pledges an
undying commitment to being a steadfast ally in America’s ‘global war on terrorism.’
The future direction of US policy toward Pakistan was made clear by Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who defended President Musharraf as an "indispensable" ally. "No country has done more in terms of inflicting damage and punishment on the Taliban and al-Qaeda since 9/11 . . .There's nothing more important at this time than for the United States to be consistently engaged and committed to try to do the right thing with Pakistan," he told a congressional committee.
Informed observers say the relatively mild US reaction to the Pakistan crisis -- along with similar predicaments such as the Iraqi election and the Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections -- has sounded the death-knell for President Bush’s democracy-promotion agenda. Others say the agenda never existed in the first place. They charge that the Bush Administration has chosen to cozy up to numerous authoritarian rulers abroad supposedly to support more important strategic goals. Some point to Egypt as one of many examples.
President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since 1981, won another six-year term in office by “popular referendum” in 2005, garnering 88.6 percent of the total vote in an election that many believe was rife with electoral fraud and intimidation. Despite its shortcomings, the Bush administration welcomed the vote as a positive step towards democracy and massive American aid to Egypt continued without interruption.
Mubarak came to power following the assassination of ex-president Anwar el-Sadat by Islamic extremists in 1981. He declared the country under a “state of emergency,” giving the government the right to imprison individuals for any period of time, and for virtually no reason, thus keeping them in jailed without trials for any period.
The ‘emergency laws” have been in effect ever since. The US State Department and human rights groups throughout the world have documented a litany of egregious abuses under the ‘emergency’ regimen, including stifling of opposition political parties, torture and death indetention, and the arrests and imprisonment of political opponents, journalists and human rights defenders with little or no due process.
In 2006, President George W. Bush pressed the aging Mubarak to open his political system to multi-party elections. Mubarak pledged to allow opposition parties to participate in presidential as well as parliamentary elections. Instead, he jailed his chief opponent and extended the draconian emergency laws.
The US Government response was cancellation of a planned visit to Cairo by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Meanhile, Washington has provided billions in military and economic aid to Egypt – behind only Israel and Pakistan as the largest recipients.
US interest in Egypt centers on its place as the largest Arab country in the Middle East, its role in furthering American military and foreign policy, and its potential for helping to realize an end to the long-running Israeli-Palestinian issue. Egypt has maintained formal – if chilly – diplomatic relations with Israel since Egyptian President Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin met with US President Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978. A year later, Egypt became the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel. It has been a major recipient of US military and economic aid ever since. But it has done little to use its influence to broker a peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel.
As in Pakistan, the Mubarak government’s major justification for maintaining Egypt’s state of emergency is the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. The government says that opposition groups like the banned Muslim Brotherhood – which recently gained a substantial number of seats in Egypt’s parliament by running as ‘independents’ -- could come to power in Egypt if the Mubarak regime eliminated the emergency laws. But since its inception, the movement has officially opposed violent means to achieve its goals – a claim rejected by the Egyptian government.
Mubarak’s critics argue that this goes against President Bush’s own principles of democracy, which include a citizen's right to a fair trial and the right to vote for the candidate or party of their choice.
The Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is a multinational Sunni Islamist movement and arguably the world's largest and most influential political Islamist group. The Brotherhood remains an illegal organization in Egypt and is not recognized as a political party.
But the differences between conditions in Pakistan and Egypt are just as numerous as the similarities.
One foreign policy expert, Richard Undeland, a 35-year State Department Foreign Service veteran, says, “Pakistan is nuclear. There is no part of Egypt that is not under firm government control. Egypt does not have tribal problems. The political geography is wholly different. There is nothing analogous to Afghanistan in turmoil or nuclear India. We have no pressing, immediate problems with Egypt. Egyptian concentration of attention on Palestine finds no close parallel in Pakistan.”
His view is echoed by Samer Shehata, Professor of Arab Politics at Georgetown University. He says, “Pakistan has nuclear weapons, there are sections of the country that are not under the control – not only of Musharaf, but of a central government and radicals and extremists are stronger in mainstream politics than in Egypt, not to mention the fact that Pakistan is one of the ‘front lines’ in the so called ‘war on terrorism’.”
But experts suggest that realpolitik US decisions will not turn on the differences between Pakistan and other authoritarian regimes. They say that America will continue to champion democracy rhetorically, but will find itself making choices between actively promoting it and supporting authoritarian and often tyrannical regimes abroad.
Some observers see these choices as the result of a American hidden agenda. For example, Mark A. Levine, professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, says, “The US is behind the lack of democracy in the region; it's supported dictators, monarchs and other authoritarian leaders for half a century, regardless of which party was in the White House or controlled Congress. For a simple reason: The interests of the US military and business class -- especially the arms and oil sectors -- would not be served nearly as well, if at all, under democratic systems of government in the region.”
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
SUPPORTERS SAY ARTIST'S PROSECUTION IS ABOUT EXPRESSION,NOT BIOTERRORISM
By William Fisher
A week after 20-year-old charges were dropped against the last two defendants in the longest-running Federal prosecution in US history - the so-called L.A. Eight - another case threatens to take its place.
And critics of the Department of Justice are charging that the newest case is a clear example of prosecutorial over-zealousness.
After numerous defeats in court, the Government late last month agreed to drop deportation charges against Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, who were accused in 1987 on charges of being affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The government charged that any association with the PFLP was grounds for deportation under the McCarran-Walter Act, legislation written during the McCarthy era that allowed deportation for association with any organization that "advocated the doctrines of world Communism."
Two years later, a Federal Judge declared the charges under that law unconstitutional. The Government then charged the men with providing material support to a terrorist organization under the USA Patriot Act of 2001. It finally dropped these charges after the Los Angeles Immigration Court ruled that the Government was in violation of the men's constitutional, statutory, and regulatory rights.
The other six defendants were in the US on temporary visas when the case began. Three of them have become permanent residents. One became a permanent resident and then a naturalized citizen. Two others are eligible to become permanent residents and have applications pending. So for all practical purposes, the case against Hamide and Shehadeh was the final one.
But the clock is ticking on another case that appears to be similarly endless. It is a prosecution that many are describing as one of the most bizarre in US legal history.
The case pits avant-garde protest artists against government anti-terrorism investigators. The key players are Dr. Robert E. Ferrell, 68, a nationally known genetics researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, and Dr. Steven A. Kurtz, 48, a tenured arts professor at the University at Buffalo and a founding member of the award-winning collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Some of CAE's work is designed to protest the potential risks of genetically modified (GM) food.
The case started in May of 2004.While Kurtz was preparing for an exhibition
at MASS MoCA, a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, his wife of twenty years died in her sleep. When police responded to his 911 call, they saw petri dishes in his home -- part of the scheduled installation -- filled with bacteria cultures.
They called the FBI. While politicians and Federal prosecutors rushed to trumpet the thwarting of a major threat, Kurtz was illegally detained under the Patriot Act on suspicion of bioterrorism. The street where Kurtz's home was located was cordoned off, his house searched, and his property seized.
The Governor of New York, George Pataki, lauded the work of the FBI for disrupting a major bioterrorism threat. And the then US Attorney in Buffalo, Michael A. Battle - the lawyer who was later to become the Department of Justice employee who notified eight US Attorneys that they were being fired - praised the work of the Buffalo Joint Terrorism Task Force.
But after a several-month-long investigation, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DSH) failed to provide any evidence of "bioterrorism" On the contrary, FBI tests revealed within a few days of the incident that there were no harmful biological agents in Kurtz's house and that his wife had died of heart failure.
Forced to drop its charges of weapons manufacture, the government instead accused Kurtz and Ferrell of mail and wire fraud. They had failed to complete a question in the requisition required to transport the admittedly harmless bacteria - the purpose of the shipment. This resulted in Ferrell's plea to illegally using the mails to transport restricted materials. The charges against the two academics were brought under the Patriot Act, thus increasing the maximum penalty from five years to 20.
The defendants' supporters in the art world claim that Kurtz and Ferrell were unfairly targeted for a bogus bioterrorism prosecution because Kurtz's art exhibitions often attack government actions and policies.
The case against Kurtz and Ferrell came to a nation still terrified by the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US. Also known as Amerithrax from its FBI case name, the attacks occurred over the course of several weeks beginning in September 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic US Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. Despite a massive government investigation costing millions and covering several Continents, the crime remains unsolved.
The FBI named a government researcher, Dr. Steven Hatfill, as "a person of interest" in the investigation. His name was widely publicized in the media for months, but he has never been charged with any crime.
Prosecutors say the Kurtz-Ferrell case revolves around public safety concerns, not politics. According to reporting by Dan Herbeck of the Buffalo News, the current US Attorney, Terrance P. Flynn, has declined to comment on the case. But Lucia Sommer, a spokeswoman for Kurtz's defense fund, said that Kurtz will continue to fight the government's charges.
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has questioned the propriety of a grand jury investigation into Kurtz's work. "It doesn't appear that this investigation satisfies the FBI standards that the facts and circumstances of the case must reasonably indicate that a crime has been committed," said Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the NYCLU.
The NYCLU said that if the investigation was based on criticisms of the government espoused by Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble, then officials may have violated their free speech rights. "Unless the US Attorney is in possession of facts very different from what has been publicly reported, we call on his office to discontinue its investigation of Professor Kurtz," Lieberman said.
In Federal District Court earlier this month, the Government won the first of their battles with Ferrell and Kurtz, when Ferrell pled guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge rather than facing a prolonged trial for the mail and wire fraud felonies.
His wife, Dr. Dianne Raeke Ferrell, an Associate Professor of Special Education and Clinical Services at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, said, "From the beginning, this has been a persecution, not a prosecution."
She added, "Since this whole nightmare began, Bob has had two minor strokes and a major stroke which required months of rehabilitation." She said her husband was indicted just as he was preparing to undergo a painful and dangerous autologous stem cell transplant, the second in seven years.
His daughter said, "My dad opted to settle from pure exhaustion." Ferrell will learn what his penalty will be in a court hearing scheduled for February 2009.
Kurtz's supporters say, "The government has pursued this case relentlessly for three and a half years, spending enormous amounts of public resources. Most significantly, the legal battle has exhausted the financial, emotional, and physical resources of Ferrell and Kurtz; as well as their families and supporters. The professional and personal lives of both defendants have suffered tremendously."
Kurtz has rejected any plea deal, instead demanding a public trial. Most of the art world has rallied behind him. His colleagues in the Critical Art Ensemble have set up a website and a legal defense fund (caedefensefund.org/). Kurtz continues to teach at the University of Buffalo.
But no date has been set for his trial, giving rise to speculation by some in the legal and the arts communities that the Justice Department simply plans to 'run out the clock' until President Bush's term ends in January 2009.
Patricia J. Williams, professor of law at Columbia University, questions whether the Kurtz-Ferrell prosecution is part of a larger government reaction against anti-Administration expression in the arts. She writes, "Recently scholars from around the world have been barred from the United States for reasons stated and unstated, but all in the name of Homeland Security. They include a South African peace activist, a Canadian antipoverty worker, an Iraqi epidemiologist, most Cuban academics, a Greek economist, a British musician, a Bolivian historian."
She adds, "As other countries have adopted their own versions of Homeland Security, the tables are turning on our own: Medea Benjamin, founder of the exuberant antiwar group Code Pink, was denied entry to Canada because of her numerous arrests for peaceful acts of civil disobedience."
A week after 20-year-old charges were dropped against the last two defendants in the longest-running Federal prosecution in US history - the so-called L.A. Eight - another case threatens to take its place.
And critics of the Department of Justice are charging that the newest case is a clear example of prosecutorial over-zealousness.
After numerous defeats in court, the Government late last month agreed to drop deportation charges against Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh, who were accused in 1987 on charges of being affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The government charged that any association with the PFLP was grounds for deportation under the McCarran-Walter Act, legislation written during the McCarthy era that allowed deportation for association with any organization that "advocated the doctrines of world Communism."
Two years later, a Federal Judge declared the charges under that law unconstitutional. The Government then charged the men with providing material support to a terrorist organization under the USA Patriot Act of 2001. It finally dropped these charges after the Los Angeles Immigration Court ruled that the Government was in violation of the men's constitutional, statutory, and regulatory rights.
The other six defendants were in the US on temporary visas when the case began. Three of them have become permanent residents. One became a permanent resident and then a naturalized citizen. Two others are eligible to become permanent residents and have applications pending. So for all practical purposes, the case against Hamide and Shehadeh was the final one.
But the clock is ticking on another case that appears to be similarly endless. It is a prosecution that many are describing as one of the most bizarre in US legal history.
The case pits avant-garde protest artists against government anti-terrorism investigators. The key players are Dr. Robert E. Ferrell, 68, a nationally known genetics researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, and Dr. Steven A. Kurtz, 48, a tenured arts professor at the University at Buffalo and a founding member of the award-winning collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Some of CAE's work is designed to protest the potential risks of genetically modified (GM) food.
The case started in May of 2004.While Kurtz was preparing for an exhibition
at MASS MoCA, a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, his wife of twenty years died in her sleep. When police responded to his 911 call, they saw petri dishes in his home -- part of the scheduled installation -- filled with bacteria cultures.
They called the FBI. While politicians and Federal prosecutors rushed to trumpet the thwarting of a major threat, Kurtz was illegally detained under the Patriot Act on suspicion of bioterrorism. The street where Kurtz's home was located was cordoned off, his house searched, and his property seized.
The Governor of New York, George Pataki, lauded the work of the FBI for disrupting a major bioterrorism threat. And the then US Attorney in Buffalo, Michael A. Battle - the lawyer who was later to become the Department of Justice employee who notified eight US Attorneys that they were being fired - praised the work of the Buffalo Joint Terrorism Task Force.
But after a several-month-long investigation, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DSH) failed to provide any evidence of "bioterrorism" On the contrary, FBI tests revealed within a few days of the incident that there were no harmful biological agents in Kurtz's house and that his wife had died of heart failure.
Forced to drop its charges of weapons manufacture, the government instead accused Kurtz and Ferrell of mail and wire fraud. They had failed to complete a question in the requisition required to transport the admittedly harmless bacteria - the purpose of the shipment. This resulted in Ferrell's plea to illegally using the mails to transport restricted materials. The charges against the two academics were brought under the Patriot Act, thus increasing the maximum penalty from five years to 20.
The defendants' supporters in the art world claim that Kurtz and Ferrell were unfairly targeted for a bogus bioterrorism prosecution because Kurtz's art exhibitions often attack government actions and policies.
The case against Kurtz and Ferrell came to a nation still terrified by the 2001 anthrax attacks in the US. Also known as Amerithrax from its FBI case name, the attacks occurred over the course of several weeks beginning in September 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic US Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others. Despite a massive government investigation costing millions and covering several Continents, the crime remains unsolved.
The FBI named a government researcher, Dr. Steven Hatfill, as "a person of interest" in the investigation. His name was widely publicized in the media for months, but he has never been charged with any crime.
Prosecutors say the Kurtz-Ferrell case revolves around public safety concerns, not politics. According to reporting by Dan Herbeck of the Buffalo News, the current US Attorney, Terrance P. Flynn, has declined to comment on the case. But Lucia Sommer, a spokeswoman for Kurtz's defense fund, said that Kurtz will continue to fight the government's charges.
The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) has questioned the propriety of a grand jury investigation into Kurtz's work. "It doesn't appear that this investigation satisfies the FBI standards that the facts and circumstances of the case must reasonably indicate that a crime has been committed," said Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the NYCLU.
The NYCLU said that if the investigation was based on criticisms of the government espoused by Kurtz and the Critical Art Ensemble, then officials may have violated their free speech rights. "Unless the US Attorney is in possession of facts very different from what has been publicly reported, we call on his office to discontinue its investigation of Professor Kurtz," Lieberman said.
In Federal District Court earlier this month, the Government won the first of their battles with Ferrell and Kurtz, when Ferrell pled guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge rather than facing a prolonged trial for the mail and wire fraud felonies.
His wife, Dr. Dianne Raeke Ferrell, an Associate Professor of Special Education and Clinical Services at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, said, "From the beginning, this has been a persecution, not a prosecution."
She added, "Since this whole nightmare began, Bob has had two minor strokes and a major stroke which required months of rehabilitation." She said her husband was indicted just as he was preparing to undergo a painful and dangerous autologous stem cell transplant, the second in seven years.
His daughter said, "My dad opted to settle from pure exhaustion." Ferrell will learn what his penalty will be in a court hearing scheduled for February 2009.
Kurtz's supporters say, "The government has pursued this case relentlessly for three and a half years, spending enormous amounts of public resources. Most significantly, the legal battle has exhausted the financial, emotional, and physical resources of Ferrell and Kurtz; as well as their families and supporters. The professional and personal lives of both defendants have suffered tremendously."
Kurtz has rejected any plea deal, instead demanding a public trial. Most of the art world has rallied behind him. His colleagues in the Critical Art Ensemble have set up a website and a legal defense fund (caedefensefund.org/). Kurtz continues to teach at the University of Buffalo.
But no date has been set for his trial, giving rise to speculation by some in the legal and the arts communities that the Justice Department simply plans to 'run out the clock' until President Bush's term ends in January 2009.
Patricia J. Williams, professor of law at Columbia University, questions whether the Kurtz-Ferrell prosecution is part of a larger government reaction against anti-Administration expression in the arts. She writes, "Recently scholars from around the world have been barred from the United States for reasons stated and unstated, but all in the name of Homeland Security. They include a South African peace activist, a Canadian antipoverty worker, an Iraqi epidemiologist, most Cuban academics, a Greek economist, a British musician, a Bolivian historian."
She adds, "As other countries have adopted their own versions of Homeland Security, the tables are turning on our own: Medea Benjamin, founder of the exuberant antiwar group Code Pink, was denied entry to Canada because of her numerous arrests for peaceful acts of civil disobedience."
Saturday, November 03, 2007
SCAPEGOATING US DIPLOMATS FOR FAILURES IN IRAQ?
By William Fisher
Facing growing scrutiny of the State Department's shortage of experienced diplomats in Iraq - and the Department's announced intention to force Foreign Service Officers to serve in Baghdad against their will -- the leader of America's diplomatic service is charging that critics, "including people who urged the 2003 invasion," are seeking to blame the State Department for their own failures.
"No country's diplomatic corps has people with many of the skills now needed in Iraq: oil and gas engineers, electrical grid managers, urban planners, city managers and transportation planners. If any US defense planner in 2003 thought that the State Department and other civilian federal agencies had such people on staff in large numbers (Arabic-speaking or not) ready to rebuild Iraq, they were wrong," says John Naland, president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).
AFSA represents America's 11,500 professional diplomats. Of these, 6,500 are Foreign Service Officers while 5,000 are Foreign Service specialists, including Diplomatic Security agents. There are another 1,500 or so Foreign Service members at the US Agency for international Development (USAID), the Commerce Department's Foreign Commercial Service, the Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service and the International Broadcasting Bureau, an independent agency closely allied with State.
Naland points out that between the US invasion in 2003 through 2007, all of the more than 2,000 career Foreign Service members who served at the US mission in Baghdad and the expanding Provincial Reconstruction Teams around the country "did so as a volunteer."
Naland termed it "unfortunate" that late last month the Director General of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Harry K. Thomas, Jr., declared that "the well of volunteers had finally run dry." Thomas announced that, if volunteers could not be found for 48 remaining positions by mid-November, diplomats -- under threat of dismissal - would be ordered to serve at the embassy in Baghdad and in so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams in outlying provinces. If carried out, it would be the largest diplomatic call-up since Vietnam.
AFSA contends that "directed assignments of Foreign Service members into a war zone would be detrimental to the individual, to the post, and to the Foreign Service as a whole. AFSA urged the State Department to find ways to increase the pool of qualified voluntary bidders."
Under the new order, 200-300 diplomats have been identified as "prime candidates" to fill 48 vacancies that will open next year at the Baghdad embassy and in the provinces. Those notified that they have been selected for a one-year posting will have 10 days to accept or reject the position. If not enough say yes, some will be ordered to go. Only those with compelling reasons, such as a medical condition or extreme personal hardship, will be exempt from disciplinary action.
Diplomats are also angered that Thomas's announcement was made to the news media before it was conveyed to those likely to be deployed under the new policy.
At a 'town hall' meeting in Washington last week, some 300 US diplomats told Thomas what they thought of State's decision to force Foreign Service Officers to take jobs in Iraq.
One attendee, Jack Crotty, a senior Foreign Service officer who once worked as a political adviser with NATO forces, told the Associated Press that the new policy was tantamount to a "potential death sentence." Others expressed serious concern about the ethics of sending diplomats against their will to serve in a war zone while a review of the department's use of private security contractors to protect its staff is under way. Most Embassy staff works in the so-called 'Green Zone' - itself far from immune from incoming mortar and other types of attacks. But members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are deployed through the country, including in some of most dangerous provinces. Only Diplomatic Security agents are permitted to be armed.
The Associated Press quoted Crotty as telling Ambassador Thomas, "It's one thing if someone believes in what's going on over there and volunteers, but it's another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I'm sorry, but basically that's a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded? You know that at any other (country) in the world, the embassy would be closed at this point." His comments drew enthusiastic applause from his colleagues.
AFSA President Naland said that a recent survey found that only 12 percent of the union's membership believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was "fighting for them."
He said that some critics of US failures in Iraq are seeking to shift blame onto the Foreign Service for their own lack of pre-invasion planning, while others are as basing their comments on "wildly inflated estimations of the capacities of civilian agencies to operate in combat zones such as Iraq."
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the State Department assembled a series of blue-ribbon task forces to help prepare the Administration for the political, economic, social, cultural and religious challenges that would likely face the 'Coalition of the Willing' once the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled. The group, which included Iraqi exiles and some of the world's most distinguished Middle East scholars, made a series of recommendations. But the Defense Department, then under the leadership of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ignored their advice.
In a website statement, Naland attempted to put the Foreign Service's involvement in Iraq into perspective. He said, "Comparisons between the military and the State Department are often made with complete disregard for the facts relating to scale: budgets, personnel and capacity for war-zone service."
Naland pointed out that "the US active-duty military is 119 times larger than the Foreign Service. The total uniformed military (active and reserve) is 217 times larger. A typical U.S. Army division is larger than the entire Foreign Service. The military has more uniformed personnel in Mississippi than the State Department has diplomats worldwide. The military has more full colonels/Navy captains than the State Department has diplomats. The military has more band members than the State Department has diplomats. The Defense Department has almost as many lawyers as the State Department has diplomats."
He said that, in contrast to the military, "the vast majority of Foreign Service members are forward-deployed. Today, in a time of armed conflict, 21 percent of the active-duty military (290,000 out of 1,373,000) is stationed abroad (ashore or afloat). That compares to 68 percent of the Foreign Service currently stationed abroad at 167 U.S. embassies and 100 consulates and other missions."
Naland noted that more than 20 percent of the Foreign Service has served, or is serving, in Iraq since 2003. In the PRTs, which comprise up to 600 members, the Foreign Service component is 10 to 15 percent. There are currently approximately 200 Foreign Service positions at Embassy Baghdad and another 70 or so at the 25 Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
He said, "Foreign Service members receive very little preparation before deploying to Iraq -- less than two-weeks of special training to serve in a combat zone. Contrast that to their predecessors 40 years ago who received four to six months of training before deploying to South Vietnam...."
Naland added that surveys have shown that most Foreign Service volunteers in Iraq have been motivated not by extra pay but by "patriotism and a professional desire to try to advance the Administration's top foreign policy objective."
One of the most serious challenges facing the State Department - and every other government agency involved in Iraq and in the Middle East generally - is the acute shortage of Arabic speakers. This deficit is in danger of crippling US efforts to counter terrorist threats, communicate with prisoners, and build bridges to the Muslim world.
At the State Department, only 10 of 34,000 employees were rated fully fluent in Arabic as of 2006.
The number of Arabic language students in US universities has skyrocketed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the course still ranks behind classical Greek, Latin and even American Sign Language in popularity.
The shortage has spurred an aggressive campaign of recruiting -- including generous sign-on bonuses -- by all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.
One result of the shortage, according to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, is that analysts at the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency are "awash in untranslated gleanings of intelligence" in Arabic. Heritage also said there are not enough interpreters to handle detainees in Iraq.
The shortage is also having an effect on US efforts in public diplomacy. Adam Clayton Powell III, a senior fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, says, "There are only a half dozen or so US spokesmen who have a sufficient grasp of the Arabic language to appear on radio or television in that part of the world. That means the US is not even part of the dialogue there."
While the language situation appears to be improving, it can only improve slowly. One reason is that Arabic is viewed by many as one of the most difficult languages in the world.
The State Department rates Arabic, along with Chinese and Korean, as a "superhard" language.
Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a fluent Arabic speaker, says, "Not everyone studying Arabic is thrilled with US policies in the Middle East."
Facing growing scrutiny of the State Department's shortage of experienced diplomats in Iraq - and the Department's announced intention to force Foreign Service Officers to serve in Baghdad against their will -- the leader of America's diplomatic service is charging that critics, "including people who urged the 2003 invasion," are seeking to blame the State Department for their own failures.
"No country's diplomatic corps has people with many of the skills now needed in Iraq: oil and gas engineers, electrical grid managers, urban planners, city managers and transportation planners. If any US defense planner in 2003 thought that the State Department and other civilian federal agencies had such people on staff in large numbers (Arabic-speaking or not) ready to rebuild Iraq, they were wrong," says John Naland, president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA).
AFSA represents America's 11,500 professional diplomats. Of these, 6,500 are Foreign Service Officers while 5,000 are Foreign Service specialists, including Diplomatic Security agents. There are another 1,500 or so Foreign Service members at the US Agency for international Development (USAID), the Commerce Department's Foreign Commercial Service, the Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service and the International Broadcasting Bureau, an independent agency closely allied with State.
Naland points out that between the US invasion in 2003 through 2007, all of the more than 2,000 career Foreign Service members who served at the US mission in Baghdad and the expanding Provincial Reconstruction Teams around the country "did so as a volunteer."
Naland termed it "unfortunate" that late last month the Director General of the Foreign Service, Ambassador Harry K. Thomas, Jr., declared that "the well of volunteers had finally run dry." Thomas announced that, if volunteers could not be found for 48 remaining positions by mid-November, diplomats -- under threat of dismissal - would be ordered to serve at the embassy in Baghdad and in so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams in outlying provinces. If carried out, it would be the largest diplomatic call-up since Vietnam.
AFSA contends that "directed assignments of Foreign Service members into a war zone would be detrimental to the individual, to the post, and to the Foreign Service as a whole. AFSA urged the State Department to find ways to increase the pool of qualified voluntary bidders."
Under the new order, 200-300 diplomats have been identified as "prime candidates" to fill 48 vacancies that will open next year at the Baghdad embassy and in the provinces. Those notified that they have been selected for a one-year posting will have 10 days to accept or reject the position. If not enough say yes, some will be ordered to go. Only those with compelling reasons, such as a medical condition or extreme personal hardship, will be exempt from disciplinary action.
Diplomats are also angered that Thomas's announcement was made to the news media before it was conveyed to those likely to be deployed under the new policy.
At a 'town hall' meeting in Washington last week, some 300 US diplomats told Thomas what they thought of State's decision to force Foreign Service Officers to take jobs in Iraq.
One attendee, Jack Crotty, a senior Foreign Service officer who once worked as a political adviser with NATO forces, told the Associated Press that the new policy was tantamount to a "potential death sentence." Others expressed serious concern about the ethics of sending diplomats against their will to serve in a war zone while a review of the department's use of private security contractors to protect its staff is under way. Most Embassy staff works in the so-called 'Green Zone' - itself far from immune from incoming mortar and other types of attacks. But members of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) are deployed through the country, including in some of most dangerous provinces. Only Diplomatic Security agents are permitted to be armed.
The Associated Press quoted Crotty as telling Ambassador Thomas, "It's one thing if someone believes in what's going on over there and volunteers, but it's another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. I'm sorry, but basically that's a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded? You know that at any other (country) in the world, the embassy would be closed at this point." His comments drew enthusiastic applause from his colleagues.
AFSA President Naland said that a recent survey found that only 12 percent of the union's membership believed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was "fighting for them."
He said that some critics of US failures in Iraq are seeking to shift blame onto the Foreign Service for their own lack of pre-invasion planning, while others are as basing their comments on "wildly inflated estimations of the capacities of civilian agencies to operate in combat zones such as Iraq."
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the State Department assembled a series of blue-ribbon task forces to help prepare the Administration for the political, economic, social, cultural and religious challenges that would likely face the 'Coalition of the Willing' once the Saddam Hussein regime was toppled. The group, which included Iraqi exiles and some of the world's most distinguished Middle East scholars, made a series of recommendations. But the Defense Department, then under the leadership of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ignored their advice.
In a website statement, Naland attempted to put the Foreign Service's involvement in Iraq into perspective. He said, "Comparisons between the military and the State Department are often made with complete disregard for the facts relating to scale: budgets, personnel and capacity for war-zone service."
Naland pointed out that "the US active-duty military is 119 times larger than the Foreign Service. The total uniformed military (active and reserve) is 217 times larger. A typical U.S. Army division is larger than the entire Foreign Service. The military has more uniformed personnel in Mississippi than the State Department has diplomats worldwide. The military has more full colonels/Navy captains than the State Department has diplomats. The military has more band members than the State Department has diplomats. The Defense Department has almost as many lawyers as the State Department has diplomats."
He said that, in contrast to the military, "the vast majority of Foreign Service members are forward-deployed. Today, in a time of armed conflict, 21 percent of the active-duty military (290,000 out of 1,373,000) is stationed abroad (ashore or afloat). That compares to 68 percent of the Foreign Service currently stationed abroad at 167 U.S. embassies and 100 consulates and other missions."
Naland noted that more than 20 percent of the Foreign Service has served, or is serving, in Iraq since 2003. In the PRTs, which comprise up to 600 members, the Foreign Service component is 10 to 15 percent. There are currently approximately 200 Foreign Service positions at Embassy Baghdad and another 70 or so at the 25 Provincial Reconstruction Teams.
He said, "Foreign Service members receive very little preparation before deploying to Iraq -- less than two-weeks of special training to serve in a combat zone. Contrast that to their predecessors 40 years ago who received four to six months of training before deploying to South Vietnam...."
Naland added that surveys have shown that most Foreign Service volunteers in Iraq have been motivated not by extra pay but by "patriotism and a professional desire to try to advance the Administration's top foreign policy objective."
One of the most serious challenges facing the State Department - and every other government agency involved in Iraq and in the Middle East generally - is the acute shortage of Arabic speakers. This deficit is in danger of crippling US efforts to counter terrorist threats, communicate with prisoners, and build bridges to the Muslim world.
At the State Department, only 10 of 34,000 employees were rated fully fluent in Arabic as of 2006.
The number of Arabic language students in US universities has skyrocketed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the course still ranks behind classical Greek, Latin and even American Sign Language in popularity.
The shortage has spurred an aggressive campaign of recruiting -- including generous sign-on bonuses -- by all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the State Department, the Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security.
One result of the shortage, according to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, is that analysts at the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency are "awash in untranslated gleanings of intelligence" in Arabic. Heritage also said there are not enough interpreters to handle detainees in Iraq.
The shortage is also having an effect on US efforts in public diplomacy. Adam Clayton Powell III, a senior fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, says, "There are only a half dozen or so US spokesmen who have a sufficient grasp of the Arabic language to appear on radio or television in that part of the world. That means the US is not even part of the dialogue there."
While the language situation appears to be improving, it can only improve slowly. One reason is that Arabic is viewed by many as one of the most difficult languages in the world.
The State Department rates Arabic, along with Chinese and Korean, as a "superhard" language.
Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a fluent Arabic speaker, says, "Not everyone studying Arabic is thrilled with US policies in the Middle East."
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
WAS TOP STATE DEPARTMENT RESIGNATION A POLITICAL MOVE TO PROTECT HIGHER-UPS?
By William Fisher
Diplomatic sources believe that the State Department official charged with managing private security firms such as Blackwater and other contractors in Iraq and elsewhere overseas was ‘thrown under the bus’ by the Bush Administration seeking a ‘sacrificial lamb’ to protect the more politically powerful people who supervised his office.
Richard Griffin, State’s Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and Director of the Office of Foreign Missions (DS), resigned abruptly on October 24 in the face of a gathering firestorm of criticism regarding the management and oversight of the ‘private armies’ charged with protecting US diplomats, Iraqi government officials, and visiting VIPs including members of the House and Senate.
A State Department source, who spoke on condition of anonymity ”because of the sensitivity” of the issue, said Griffin’s resignation was calculated to provide cover for several politically better-connected higher-ups who were responsible for the overall management and oversight of contractors who provide security services and others engaged in major construction projects such as the massive new American Embassy in Baghdad.
The protected officials were identified as Griffin’s boss, Henrietta H. Fore, Undersecretary for Management, and State’s Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard.
The House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, led by feisty California Democrat Henry Waxman, has been conducting ongoing investigations into Blackwater and other private security contractors, as well as reportedly large-scale problems in the construction of the Baghdad embassy.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice testified before the Committee last week, largely evading questions about the activities of Blackwater, while acknowledging shortcomings in the supervision of the Embassy construction project but claiming that it was the State Department itself that identified and moved to correct the problems.
Krongard is already under attack by Waxman, but Fore has thus far managed to keep a relatively low profile. However, according to a State Department source, “The Waxman investigation into (the Office of the Inspector General) would have implicated Fore and Griffin pretty quickly. Of the three -- Krongard, Fore, and Griffin, Griffin has the least political clout and support. So we think that he was sacrificed early in a public gesture in order to placate the Waxman committee and keep them away from Fore, who has the most clout.”
Appointed by President Bush in August 2005 as Under Secretary for Management, Fore is responsible for the State Department’s people, resources, facilities, technology and security, and is principal advisor on management issues. Among many other management and administrative functions, she leads the Department’s diplomatic security and overseas buildings operations – the two offices most directly implicated in the Blackwater and Embassy construction issues.
Fore is also State’s White House liaison and its representative on the President's Management Council. In the wake of a sex scandal that forced the resignation of Randall Tobias as Director of US Foreign Assistance, in May she was named to fill that post as well as becoming Acting Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
According to Waxman, government officials have accused Krongard of repeatedly blocking investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the new Embassy in Baghdad, and censoring reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration.
The State Department source said, “Krongard’s guilt is that he helped cover up what Fore and Griffin did. Of the three, Griffin is the weakest link, so he gets to be the scapegoat for the other two.”
The organization that represents America’s diplomats, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) has called on Inspector General Krongard to “surrender day-to-day control of State’s vital Office of Inspector General pending the resolution of grave allegations of malfeasance leveled against him by numerous current and former career government officials.”
AFSA urged the Bush Administration to make it a top priority to obtain additional staffing resources for diplomacy. In Iraq alone, some 270 Foreign Service positions remain unfilled. State has also requested funds to hire an additional 100 DS Special Agents.
But the State Department source says Griffin is more than a mere scapegoat. The Bureau Griffin headed hired Blackwater and other private security firms including DynCorp and Triple Canopy, “ostensibly trained them, supervised them, and then failed to hold them accountable for errors. In fact, it appears that the DS Bureau actually covered up for Blackwater in several cases.”
One diplomat said, “While construction of the Embassy is supervised by another State office, Griffin’s office was also involved. It is responsible for supervising the construction of, and certifying, physical security features, such as bomb resistant walls, protective barriers, and so forth. In order for OBO to accept the building contractors' work, DS has to certify that the work on these features meets or exceeds their security standards. One complaint is that a wall, ostensibly certified by DS as meeting their standards (which should have been impervious to a rocket attack) was breached by a launched grenade (smaller than a rocket), which obviously meant that it should never have been certified as ‘safe’.” The Office of the Inspector General (IG) and Griffin’s office are accused of attempting to cover up this fact.
A diplomatic advocacy group, Concerned Foreign Service Officers (CFSO), said that Griffin and his deputy, “fostered the kind of ‘we are above the law - accountable to no-one’ environment which gave carte blanche to Blackwater and others to act as they saw fit.”
The organization said the killing of Iraqi civilians and other alleged excesses by Blackwater “come as little surprise to those who have complained for years about the ‘above-the-law’ culture that has developed in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security.”
It charged that DS believes “that the laws and regulations of the United States need not apply to those who are entrusted to enforce those laws or to protect American diplomats.”
Griffin, an ambassador-rank official who previously held senior posts with the Secret Service and Veteran's Affairs Administration, had been in his current position since June 2005.
The management and oversight of security contractors such as Blackwater intensified after Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle on Sept. 16. The FBI, as well as the Iraqi government and the State and Defense departments are investigating the incident, but Baghdad has ordered Blackwater to leave Iraq and has vowed to overturn a law shielding contractors from prosecution.
Earlier, in 2005, a drunken American employee of Blackwater, had shot and killed one of the personal bodyguards of Iraq’s vice president the night before. Within 36 hours of the shooting, Blackwater and the embassy had shipped him out of the country. But as with previous killings by contractors, the case was handled with apologies and a payoff.
Blackwater fired the shooter and fined him $14,697 -- the total of his back pay, a scheduled bonus and the cost of his plane ticket home, according to Blackwater documents. The amount nearly equaled the $15,000 the company agreed to give the Iraqi guard's family.
The recent shootings have also triggered the disclosure of a number of similar events previously, and reopened a long-standing feud between the State Department and the Pentagon about who is responsible for the safety of US civilians serving in Iraq. Also at issue is the question of whether civilian contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted under US criminal law, the Pentagon’s Uniform Code of Military Justice, or not at all.
According to an email from a US Embassy spokesman to superiors. "If the [private security company] is found negligent, the only recourse is dismissal. In cases where there was clear criminal intent, a criminal case could hypothetically be pursued in US federal court, but this has yet to happen out here."
With State Department and FBI investigations underway, the military leaked its own report on the September 16 shootings, finding no evidence that the Blackwater guards fired in self-defense, as the company has maintained. US officers have publicly criticized the security contractors as out-of-control "cowboys" whose behavior alienates Iraqis.
Testifying before Waxman’s committee, Blackwater founder and CEO Erik Prince refused to comment on the September 16 shootings because they are the subject of ongoing investigations. But he defended his company’s record. He noted that 30 Blackwater employees had been killed in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003 and that there had been no casualties among those the company was charged to protect.
Some Democrats in Congress have pointed out that Prince and his family has long been substantial contributors to Republican candidates and causes, but State Department officials have said the contracting process is immune from political influence. Prince is a former US Navy Seal.
In response to the growing criticism of Blackwater and similar contractors, DS has more than doubled its three-dozen agents in Baghdad. It has deployed to Iraq a third of the 100-agent SWAT force it maintains for emergencies anywhere in the world. Secretary Rice has ordered that at least one DS agent accompany every Blackwater-guarded convoy leaving the Green Zone -- an average of six or seven each day -- and has directed DS to monitor and archive radio and video transmissions from Blackwater vehicles to be used as evidence in any future incident.
Some observers believe continuing Congressional scrutiny may force Rice to remove Blackwater's approximately 900 personal-security personnel from Iraq. And a new, $112 million contract was signed with Blackwater just last month may be in jeopardy, according to a senior DS official.
The new contract added 241 Blackwater personnel and increased its helicopter fleet in Iraq from eight to 24 to provide a quick-reaction air component for diplomatic transport, medical evacuation and rescue -- tasks the military has declined to take on.
According to documents obtained by Waxman’s committee, contractors are highly paid for security duties: Blackwater charges State $1,221.62 a day for a "protective security specialist," according to a 2005 invoice released by the committee.
But during a recent interview on the "Charlie Rose" television show, Blackwater head Prince said, “That is an all-inclusive cost. They get paid well, but they get paid only for every day they are at work in a hot zone. They pay significant taxes right off the top of that, state and federal. They have to cover their own insurance, their own housing allowance -- all those benefits that a soldier gets wrapped in."
In any case, Prince said, "I know it would be hard for the State Department to recruit other people to come over and do reconstruction work . . . if some of them are going home in coffins." Most of Blackwater’s security personnel have formerly served in the US military.
The Blackwater controversy intensified even as Secretary Rice appeared before Waxman’s committee, where she acknowledged that she regretted that oversight of security contractors was not as good as it could have been but generally defended her department's performance.
At the same time, however, ABC News revealed new evidence that the US sought to conceal details of Blackwater shootings of Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.
ABC charged that internal e-mails “show that State Department officials tried to deflect a 2005 Los Angeles Times inquiry into an alleged killing of an Iraqi civilian by Blackwater guards.
"Give [the Los Angeles Times] what we can and then dump the rest on Blackwater," one State Department official wrote to another in the e-mails. "We can't win this one."
One department official taking part in a chain of e-mails noted that the "findings of the investigation are to remain off-limits to the reporter." Another recommended that there be no mention of the existence of a criminal investigation since such a reference would "raise questions and issues."
In the May 2005 incident, a Blackwater convoy was transporting a senior US diplomat down a Baghdad thoroughfare when guards opened fire on an approaching taxi. The taxi driver told The Times that he was slowing to a stop when a burst of machine-gun fire cut into his taxi, wounding him and killing a 19-year-old passenger.
The Times began making inquiries after receiving a tip in August 2005. Peter Mitchell, then a spokesman for the US Embassy, told superiors that he planned to tell a reporter that the State Department had "thoroughly investigated" the incident and that "no criminal act occurred."
ABC charged that the e-mails indicate, however, that the only investigation done was "administrative." Two Blackwater employees were fired and sent back to the US after they were found to have violated operating procedures. Blackwater has declined to comment on the incident.
Following allegations of waste, fraud and mismanagement in the construction of the new Baghdad Embassy, a 182-page report prepared by the embassy itself concluded that "Currently, Iraq is not capable of even rudimentary enforcement of anticorruption laws." As a result, the report said, corruption has become "the norm in many [Iraqi government] ministries."
The confidential report, first disclosed by The Nation magazine, said "All indications point to corruption as undermining the support of the population for Iraq's government." The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, it said, “is an enabler of the spreading corruption.”
It added,"The Prime Minister's Office has demonstrated an open hostility
to the concept of an independent agency to investigate or prosecute corruption cases. The Iraqi Government has been withholding basic support and resources" from an Iraqi Government commission formed to investigate corruption.
In her testimony before the Waxman committee, Secretary Rice vowed to examine corruption allegations against Maliki, but refused to discuss publicly what she said could be rumor. Rice said her office would look into these allegations as well as "hundreds of reports of corruption" among other Iraqi officials.
Meanwhile, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) says urgent action is needed to deploy more foreign service personnel worldwide, as well as to hotspots such as Iraq and Afghanistan. AFSA’s president, John K. Naland, says, “The magnitude of current staffing shortfalls is astounding.” He said the current deficit is 2,094 Foreign Service positions worldwide.
Diplomatic sources believe that the State Department official charged with managing private security firms such as Blackwater and other contractors in Iraq and elsewhere overseas was ‘thrown under the bus’ by the Bush Administration seeking a ‘sacrificial lamb’ to protect the more politically powerful people who supervised his office.
Richard Griffin, State’s Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and Director of the Office of Foreign Missions (DS), resigned abruptly on October 24 in the face of a gathering firestorm of criticism regarding the management and oversight of the ‘private armies’ charged with protecting US diplomats, Iraqi government officials, and visiting VIPs including members of the House and Senate.
A State Department source, who spoke on condition of anonymity ”because of the sensitivity” of the issue, said Griffin’s resignation was calculated to provide cover for several politically better-connected higher-ups who were responsible for the overall management and oversight of contractors who provide security services and others engaged in major construction projects such as the massive new American Embassy in Baghdad.
The protected officials were identified as Griffin’s boss, Henrietta H. Fore, Undersecretary for Management, and State’s Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard.
The House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, led by feisty California Democrat Henry Waxman, has been conducting ongoing investigations into Blackwater and other private security contractors, as well as reportedly large-scale problems in the construction of the Baghdad embassy.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice testified before the Committee last week, largely evading questions about the activities of Blackwater, while acknowledging shortcomings in the supervision of the Embassy construction project but claiming that it was the State Department itself that identified and moved to correct the problems.
Krongard is already under attack by Waxman, but Fore has thus far managed to keep a relatively low profile. However, according to a State Department source, “The Waxman investigation into (the Office of the Inspector General) would have implicated Fore and Griffin pretty quickly. Of the three -- Krongard, Fore, and Griffin, Griffin has the least political clout and support. So we think that he was sacrificed early in a public gesture in order to placate the Waxman committee and keep them away from Fore, who has the most clout.”
Appointed by President Bush in August 2005 as Under Secretary for Management, Fore is responsible for the State Department’s people, resources, facilities, technology and security, and is principal advisor on management issues. Among many other management and administrative functions, she leads the Department’s diplomatic security and overseas buildings operations – the two offices most directly implicated in the Blackwater and Embassy construction issues.
Fore is also State’s White House liaison and its representative on the President's Management Council. In the wake of a sex scandal that forced the resignation of Randall Tobias as Director of US Foreign Assistance, in May she was named to fill that post as well as becoming Acting Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
According to Waxman, government officials have accused Krongard of repeatedly blocking investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the new Embassy in Baghdad, and censoring reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration.
The State Department source said, “Krongard’s guilt is that he helped cover up what Fore and Griffin did. Of the three, Griffin is the weakest link, so he gets to be the scapegoat for the other two.”
The organization that represents America’s diplomats, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) has called on Inspector General Krongard to “surrender day-to-day control of State’s vital Office of Inspector General pending the resolution of grave allegations of malfeasance leveled against him by numerous current and former career government officials.”
AFSA urged the Bush Administration to make it a top priority to obtain additional staffing resources for diplomacy. In Iraq alone, some 270 Foreign Service positions remain unfilled. State has also requested funds to hire an additional 100 DS Special Agents.
But the State Department source says Griffin is more than a mere scapegoat. The Bureau Griffin headed hired Blackwater and other private security firms including DynCorp and Triple Canopy, “ostensibly trained them, supervised them, and then failed to hold them accountable for errors. In fact, it appears that the DS Bureau actually covered up for Blackwater in several cases.”
One diplomat said, “While construction of the Embassy is supervised by another State office, Griffin’s office was also involved. It is responsible for supervising the construction of, and certifying, physical security features, such as bomb resistant walls, protective barriers, and so forth. In order for OBO to accept the building contractors' work, DS has to certify that the work on these features meets or exceeds their security standards. One complaint is that a wall, ostensibly certified by DS as meeting their standards (which should have been impervious to a rocket attack) was breached by a launched grenade (smaller than a rocket), which obviously meant that it should never have been certified as ‘safe’.” The Office of the Inspector General (IG) and Griffin’s office are accused of attempting to cover up this fact.
A diplomatic advocacy group, Concerned Foreign Service Officers (CFSO), said that Griffin and his deputy, “fostered the kind of ‘we are above the law - accountable to no-one’ environment which gave carte blanche to Blackwater and others to act as they saw fit.”
The organization said the killing of Iraqi civilians and other alleged excesses by Blackwater “come as little surprise to those who have complained for years about the ‘above-the-law’ culture that has developed in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security.”
It charged that DS believes “that the laws and regulations of the United States need not apply to those who are entrusted to enforce those laws or to protect American diplomats.”
Griffin, an ambassador-rank official who previously held senior posts with the Secret Service and Veteran's Affairs Administration, had been in his current position since June 2005.
The management and oversight of security contractors such as Blackwater intensified after Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle on Sept. 16. The FBI, as well as the Iraqi government and the State and Defense departments are investigating the incident, but Baghdad has ordered Blackwater to leave Iraq and has vowed to overturn a law shielding contractors from prosecution.
Earlier, in 2005, a drunken American employee of Blackwater, had shot and killed one of the personal bodyguards of Iraq’s vice president the night before. Within 36 hours of the shooting, Blackwater and the embassy had shipped him out of the country. But as with previous killings by contractors, the case was handled with apologies and a payoff.
Blackwater fired the shooter and fined him $14,697 -- the total of his back pay, a scheduled bonus and the cost of his plane ticket home, according to Blackwater documents. The amount nearly equaled the $15,000 the company agreed to give the Iraqi guard's family.
The recent shootings have also triggered the disclosure of a number of similar events previously, and reopened a long-standing feud between the State Department and the Pentagon about who is responsible for the safety of US civilians serving in Iraq. Also at issue is the question of whether civilian contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted under US criminal law, the Pentagon’s Uniform Code of Military Justice, or not at all.
According to an email from a US Embassy spokesman to superiors. "If the [private security company] is found negligent, the only recourse is dismissal. In cases where there was clear criminal intent, a criminal case could hypothetically be pursued in US federal court, but this has yet to happen out here."
With State Department and FBI investigations underway, the military leaked its own report on the September 16 shootings, finding no evidence that the Blackwater guards fired in self-defense, as the company has maintained. US officers have publicly criticized the security contractors as out-of-control "cowboys" whose behavior alienates Iraqis.
Testifying before Waxman’s committee, Blackwater founder and CEO Erik Prince refused to comment on the September 16 shootings because they are the subject of ongoing investigations. But he defended his company’s record. He noted that 30 Blackwater employees had been killed in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003 and that there had been no casualties among those the company was charged to protect.
Some Democrats in Congress have pointed out that Prince and his family has long been substantial contributors to Republican candidates and causes, but State Department officials have said the contracting process is immune from political influence. Prince is a former US Navy Seal.
In response to the growing criticism of Blackwater and similar contractors, DS has more than doubled its three-dozen agents in Baghdad. It has deployed to Iraq a third of the 100-agent SWAT force it maintains for emergencies anywhere in the world. Secretary Rice has ordered that at least one DS agent accompany every Blackwater-guarded convoy leaving the Green Zone -- an average of six or seven each day -- and has directed DS to monitor and archive radio and video transmissions from Blackwater vehicles to be used as evidence in any future incident.
Some observers believe continuing Congressional scrutiny may force Rice to remove Blackwater's approximately 900 personal-security personnel from Iraq. And a new, $112 million contract was signed with Blackwater just last month may be in jeopardy, according to a senior DS official.
The new contract added 241 Blackwater personnel and increased its helicopter fleet in Iraq from eight to 24 to provide a quick-reaction air component for diplomatic transport, medical evacuation and rescue -- tasks the military has declined to take on.
According to documents obtained by Waxman’s committee, contractors are highly paid for security duties: Blackwater charges State $1,221.62 a day for a "protective security specialist," according to a 2005 invoice released by the committee.
But during a recent interview on the "Charlie Rose" television show, Blackwater head Prince said, “That is an all-inclusive cost. They get paid well, but they get paid only for every day they are at work in a hot zone. They pay significant taxes right off the top of that, state and federal. They have to cover their own insurance, their own housing allowance -- all those benefits that a soldier gets wrapped in."
In any case, Prince said, "I know it would be hard for the State Department to recruit other people to come over and do reconstruction work . . . if some of them are going home in coffins." Most of Blackwater’s security personnel have formerly served in the US military.
The Blackwater controversy intensified even as Secretary Rice appeared before Waxman’s committee, where she acknowledged that she regretted that oversight of security contractors was not as good as it could have been but generally defended her department's performance.
At the same time, however, ABC News revealed new evidence that the US sought to conceal details of Blackwater shootings of Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.
ABC charged that internal e-mails “show that State Department officials tried to deflect a 2005 Los Angeles Times inquiry into an alleged killing of an Iraqi civilian by Blackwater guards.
"Give [the Los Angeles Times] what we can and then dump the rest on Blackwater," one State Department official wrote to another in the e-mails. "We can't win this one."
One department official taking part in a chain of e-mails noted that the "findings of the investigation are to remain off-limits to the reporter." Another recommended that there be no mention of the existence of a criminal investigation since such a reference would "raise questions and issues."
In the May 2005 incident, a Blackwater convoy was transporting a senior US diplomat down a Baghdad thoroughfare when guards opened fire on an approaching taxi. The taxi driver told The Times that he was slowing to a stop when a burst of machine-gun fire cut into his taxi, wounding him and killing a 19-year-old passenger.
The Times began making inquiries after receiving a tip in August 2005. Peter Mitchell, then a spokesman for the US Embassy, told superiors that he planned to tell a reporter that the State Department had "thoroughly investigated" the incident and that "no criminal act occurred."
ABC charged that the e-mails indicate, however, that the only investigation done was "administrative." Two Blackwater employees were fired and sent back to the US after they were found to have violated operating procedures. Blackwater has declined to comment on the incident.
Following allegations of waste, fraud and mismanagement in the construction of the new Baghdad Embassy, a 182-page report prepared by the embassy itself concluded that "Currently, Iraq is not capable of even rudimentary enforcement of anticorruption laws." As a result, the report said, corruption has become "the norm in many [Iraqi government] ministries."
The confidential report, first disclosed by The Nation magazine, said "All indications point to corruption as undermining the support of the population for Iraq's government." The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, it said, “is an enabler of the spreading corruption.”
It added,"The Prime Minister's Office has demonstrated an open hostility
to the concept of an independent agency to investigate or prosecute corruption cases. The Iraqi Government has been withholding basic support and resources" from an Iraqi Government commission formed to investigate corruption.
In her testimony before the Waxman committee, Secretary Rice vowed to examine corruption allegations against Maliki, but refused to discuss publicly what she said could be rumor. Rice said her office would look into these allegations as well as "hundreds of reports of corruption" among other Iraqi officials.
Meanwhile, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) says urgent action is needed to deploy more foreign service personnel worldwide, as well as to hotspots such as Iraq and Afghanistan. AFSA’s president, John K. Naland, says, “The magnitude of current staffing shortfalls is astounding.” He said the current deficit is 2,094 Foreign Service positions worldwide.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
FOREIGN SERVICE, RIGHTS GROUPS, FIND BLACKWATER "EXCESSES" NO SURPRISE
By William Fisher
A diplomatic advocacy organization charged today (Oct. 15) that the a powerful State Department office and the Department's Inspector General are protecting Blackwater and other private security contractors by creating a "pattern of deceit involving direct collusion" to conceal a wide variety of problems from Congressional and American taxpayer oversight.
The organization, Concerned Foreign Service Officers (CFSO), said the State Department's Office of Diplomatic Security (DS) - which supervises Blackwater and other contractors - believes that "the laws and regulations of the United States need not apply to those who are entrusted to enforce those laws or to protect American diplomats."
"It is foolish to imagine that DS would hold contractors such as Blackwater to a higher standard than it holds its own agents. Until a culture of greater transparency, accountability and propriety is developed within DS, placing contractors under tighter DS control will not prevent further abuses. It will simply make it easier for the State Department to conceal those abuses from the American people and from Congress," the organization said in a statement.
A spokesman for the group, who spoke to Truthout on condition of anonymity, added that the State Department's Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard, has "routinely deferred to DS regarding what and who to investigate." Referring to the head of DS, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Griffin, the CFSO spokesman added that the Office of the Inspector General believes that "whatever Griff wants, Griff gets."
Griffin, who leads a powerful global force of 32,000 special agents, engineers, couriers, security specialists, and others who make up State's security and law enforcement arm, was appointed by President Bush in June 2005. His law enforcement background includes service as Deputy Director at the US Secret Service, where he was responsible for planning and directing all investigative, protective, and administrative programs. He began his career with the Secret Service in 1971 as an agent in the Chicago office. Subsequent positions included Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Presidential Protective Division, Special Agent in Charge in Los Angeles, Deputy Assistant Director in the Office of Investigations, and Assistant Director for Protective Operations.
Krongard, appointed as the State Department Inspector General by President George W. Bush in May 2005, has been under intense fire from key members of Congress, led by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), who earlier this month dispatched a 13-page letter to the Inspector General, accusing him of "repeatedly blocking investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the US Embassy in Baghdad, and censoring reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration."
Waxman's letter said, "One consistent element in these allegations is that you believe your foremost mission is to support the Bush administration.'' He added that the allegations were based on the testimony of seven current and former officials on Krongard's staff, including two former senior officials who allowed their names to be used, and private e-mail exchanges obtained by the committee. The letter said the allegations concerned all three major divisions of Krongard's office -- investigations, audits and inspections.
Krongard has called Waxman's allegations "replete with inaccuracies." He said he has tried to assist other agencies without overlapping with other investigations.
A graduate of Harvard law school, Krongard has a long history of associations with establishment organizations and law firms.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which Waxman chairs, is expected to hold a hearing into the conduct of the Inspector General, and it is now generally thought that Blackwater is likely to become a central focus of the inquiry.
Meanwhile, Blackwater has come under attack from a variety of human rights and citizens' action groups.
Amnesty International said, "allegations of contractor involvement in serious human rights violations - including participation by contractors in the torture at Abu Ghraib - have emerged, yet Bush administration officials have made virtually no effort to hold contractors accountable or compensate victims."
The organization added that the US Justice Department "has largely failed in its obligation to prosecute US contractors for serious human rights violations, and worse, it appears to have taken steps to undermine access to justice."
It pointed out more than three years after the establishment of a Task Force by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "the Task Force has not brought a single indictment against a contractor for abuse of detainees," according to Amnesty.
Another advocacy group, Working Assets / Act for Change, charged that "the September 16, 2007 lethal shootings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater employees points out once again the need for accountability of contractors operating in conflict zones."
The organization declared that "Bush administration officials have made virtually no effort to hold contractors accountable or compensate victims. Indeed, the State Department seems to be doing its best to protect, not investigate, Blackwater."
"Blackwater employees who, after reportedly firing shots that killed at least 11 Iraqis, might never face criminal charges because loopholes in US law mean that civilian contractors are practically free to treat Iraq and Afghanistan like the Wild West," according to Will Easton, Manager of Act For Change. Com / Working Assets.
Various legislative proposals designed to reign in private security contractors are gaining momentum in Congress. Representative David Price's (D-NC) Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) Expansion and Enforcement Act of 2007 clarifies US jurisdiction to prosecute contractors of all US agencies operating near a conflict area, establishes an FBI unit to investigate incidents of use of force by contractors, and requires the Department of Justice to report on how it is handling cases of contractor crime.
The bill was passsed in the House on October 4 with a 389-30 vote. Senator Barack Obama then introduced companion legislation in the Senate, the Security Contractor Accountability Act of 2007 (S. 2147).
But not all observers agree with the view that Blackwater and similar contractors are out of control. One conservative news source, Newsmax, defended the company.
It said, "Blackwater's major 'sin' has nothing to do with Iraq, and everything to do with U.S. politics. Congressional Democrats have made the firm, and its founder Erik Prince, the punching bag for their anti-Bush campaign."
Newsmax went on to write, "One reason Washington insiders say (Blackwater founder and CEO Erik) Prince and company are being targeted is his unapologetic support for the GOP and conservative causes."
Prince, a former Navy Seal, worked as a White House intern under President George H.W. Bush. Prince and his family have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and other conservative and religious causes, according to The New York Times. He reportedly gave more than $500,000 to Focus on the Family from July 2003 to July 2006.
Inspectors General are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate. The IG's mission is to independently investigate and make corrective recommendations regarding waste, fraud and improper conduct within their respective departments and agencies. IGs serve in all major government department departments, and smaller agencies, as well as in the military.
While the IG Act of 1978 requires that IGs be selected based upon their qualifications and not political affiliation, IGs are considered political appointees and are often selected in part because of their political relationships and party affiliation.
A diplomatic advocacy organization charged today (Oct. 15) that the a powerful State Department office and the Department's Inspector General are protecting Blackwater and other private security contractors by creating a "pattern of deceit involving direct collusion" to conceal a wide variety of problems from Congressional and American taxpayer oversight.
The organization, Concerned Foreign Service Officers (CFSO), said the State Department's Office of Diplomatic Security (DS) - which supervises Blackwater and other contractors - believes that "the laws and regulations of the United States need not apply to those who are entrusted to enforce those laws or to protect American diplomats."
"It is foolish to imagine that DS would hold contractors such as Blackwater to a higher standard than it holds its own agents. Until a culture of greater transparency, accountability and propriety is developed within DS, placing contractors under tighter DS control will not prevent further abuses. It will simply make it easier for the State Department to conceal those abuses from the American people and from Congress," the organization said in a statement.
A spokesman for the group, who spoke to Truthout on condition of anonymity, added that the State Department's Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard, has "routinely deferred to DS regarding what and who to investigate." Referring to the head of DS, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Griffin, the CFSO spokesman added that the Office of the Inspector General believes that "whatever Griff wants, Griff gets."
Griffin, who leads a powerful global force of 32,000 special agents, engineers, couriers, security specialists, and others who make up State's security and law enforcement arm, was appointed by President Bush in June 2005. His law enforcement background includes service as Deputy Director at the US Secret Service, where he was responsible for planning and directing all investigative, protective, and administrative programs. He began his career with the Secret Service in 1971 as an agent in the Chicago office. Subsequent positions included Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Presidential Protective Division, Special Agent in Charge in Los Angeles, Deputy Assistant Director in the Office of Investigations, and Assistant Director for Protective Operations.
Krongard, appointed as the State Department Inspector General by President George W. Bush in May 2005, has been under intense fire from key members of Congress, led by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), who earlier this month dispatched a 13-page letter to the Inspector General, accusing him of "repeatedly blocking investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the US Embassy in Baghdad, and censoring reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration."
Waxman's letter said, "One consistent element in these allegations is that you believe your foremost mission is to support the Bush administration.'' He added that the allegations were based on the testimony of seven current and former officials on Krongard's staff, including two former senior officials who allowed their names to be used, and private e-mail exchanges obtained by the committee. The letter said the allegations concerned all three major divisions of Krongard's office -- investigations, audits and inspections.
Krongard has called Waxman's allegations "replete with inaccuracies." He said he has tried to assist other agencies without overlapping with other investigations.
A graduate of Harvard law school, Krongard has a long history of associations with establishment organizations and law firms.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which Waxman chairs, is expected to hold a hearing into the conduct of the Inspector General, and it is now generally thought that Blackwater is likely to become a central focus of the inquiry.
Meanwhile, Blackwater has come under attack from a variety of human rights and citizens' action groups.
Amnesty International said, "allegations of contractor involvement in serious human rights violations - including participation by contractors in the torture at Abu Ghraib - have emerged, yet Bush administration officials have made virtually no effort to hold contractors accountable or compensate victims."
The organization added that the US Justice Department "has largely failed in its obligation to prosecute US contractors for serious human rights violations, and worse, it appears to have taken steps to undermine access to justice."
It pointed out more than three years after the establishment of a Task Force by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "the Task Force has not brought a single indictment against a contractor for abuse of detainees," according to Amnesty.
Another advocacy group, Working Assets / Act for Change, charged that "the September 16, 2007 lethal shootings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater employees points out once again the need for accountability of contractors operating in conflict zones."
The organization declared that "Bush administration officials have made virtually no effort to hold contractors accountable or compensate victims. Indeed, the State Department seems to be doing its best to protect, not investigate, Blackwater."
"Blackwater employees who, after reportedly firing shots that killed at least 11 Iraqis, might never face criminal charges because loopholes in US law mean that civilian contractors are practically free to treat Iraq and Afghanistan like the Wild West," according to Will Easton, Manager of Act For Change. Com / Working Assets.
Various legislative proposals designed to reign in private security contractors are gaining momentum in Congress. Representative David Price's (D-NC) Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) Expansion and Enforcement Act of 2007 clarifies US jurisdiction to prosecute contractors of all US agencies operating near a conflict area, establishes an FBI unit to investigate incidents of use of force by contractors, and requires the Department of Justice to report on how it is handling cases of contractor crime.
The bill was passsed in the House on October 4 with a 389-30 vote. Senator Barack Obama then introduced companion legislation in the Senate, the Security Contractor Accountability Act of 2007 (S. 2147).
But not all observers agree with the view that Blackwater and similar contractors are out of control. One conservative news source, Newsmax, defended the company.
It said, "Blackwater's major 'sin' has nothing to do with Iraq, and everything to do with U.S. politics. Congressional Democrats have made the firm, and its founder Erik Prince, the punching bag for their anti-Bush campaign."
Newsmax went on to write, "One reason Washington insiders say (Blackwater founder and CEO Erik) Prince and company are being targeted is his unapologetic support for the GOP and conservative causes."
Prince, a former Navy Seal, worked as a White House intern under President George H.W. Bush. Prince and his family have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates and other conservative and religious causes, according to The New York Times. He reportedly gave more than $500,000 to Focus on the Family from July 2003 to July 2006.
Inspectors General are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate. The IG's mission is to independently investigate and make corrective recommendations regarding waste, fraud and improper conduct within their respective departments and agencies. IGs serve in all major government department departments, and smaller agencies, as well as in the military.
While the IG Act of 1978 requires that IGs be selected based upon their qualifications and not political affiliation, IGs are considered political appointees and are often selected in part because of their political relationships and party affiliation.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
BISHOP TUTU DISINVITED BY UNIVERSITY THAT HOSTED COULTER
By William Fisher
Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu has been disinvited to speak at a St. Paul, Minnesota, university because of allegations that he made "hurtful" comments about Israel that might offend local Jews.
Tutu, widely revered for his opposition to South Africa's apartheid system, was proposed to the University of St. Thomas administration as a speaker for a spring 2008 event planned by the local chapter of a youth group known as Peace Jam International.
.
According to a university official, Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations, "basic background research" about Tutu turned up "some red flags" concerning "some things that (Tutu) had said about Israel."
Hennes told a St. Paul newspaper he made some inquiries, including one to a spokeswoman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The organization's representative called Hennes' attention to a speech Tutu made in Boston in 2002 that was reportedly critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
She also said that Tutu's speech referred to a "powerful" Jewish lobby in the US, which she said invoked a stereotype of Jewish power, and another where he asked aloud if Jews had forgotten that God cares about the downtrodden.
Hennes said it was a "judgment call" made by St. Thomas' president, the Rev. Dennis Dease. "The basic response we got was that (Tutu) had said some things in the past that have been hurtful to the Jewish community," Hennes said. "When we looked at that, we just decided we're not going to invite him."
Tutu's 2002 speech was reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), an international news agency serving Jewish community newspapers and media around the world. But JTA critics, including Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, claim the news agency's reporting was distorted.
A transcript of Tutu's speech reveals he said, "The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal (in the US), and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures? People are scared in (the US) to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? This is God's world. For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosovic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust."
Tutu added, "We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers."
Many other Americans who are critical of Israeli government policies have been similarly criticized. These include former President Jimmy Carter, whose recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," was immediately attacked as being anti-Semitic.
Ironically, unquestioning acceptance of Israeli government policies is virtually unknown in Israel, where political debate tends to be ubiquitous, fractious and highly charged. Many in Israel are far more critical than either Carter or Tutu regarding Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
At the university in St. Paul, the Tutu controversy triggered heated pushback from some faculty members. A professor was stripped of her leadership post at the school's Justice and Peace Studies Program for the way she challenged the administration's decision.
And Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor, who said he was incensed by the Tutu decision, said, "I think the Israeli lobby in our country has been attempting to silence criticisms of Israel in the academic world. That does a disservice to the state of Israel and all Jews," said Davidov, 76, who said he experienced anti-Semitism as a child in Detroit.
He said anyone who criticizes Israel for treatment of Palestinians ends up labeled as anti-Semitic.
Two years ago, St. Thomas - a Catholic diocesan institution founded in 1885 and now the largest private university in Minnesota - hosted an appearance by incendiary
right-wing pundit Ann Coulter. Coulter once said of Muslims, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Coulter spoke at the school to promote her book, "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right." Her appearance required extra security.
Bishop Tutu's most recent US appearance was as a guest panelist at an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, an organization formed by former President Bill Clinton to bring together leaders from the private and public sectors, religion, science and technology, medicine, and many other specialties, to promote peace, healthcare, educational and other essential services to underdeveloped countries.
Meanwhile, the youth group that proposed Tutu to St. Thomas has moved its conference to another venue -- Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, where the Nobel laureate will speak on April 11.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu has been disinvited to speak at a St. Paul, Minnesota, university because of allegations that he made "hurtful" comments about Israel that might offend local Jews.
Tutu, widely revered for his opposition to South Africa's apartheid system, was proposed to the University of St. Thomas administration as a speaker for a spring 2008 event planned by the local chapter of a youth group known as Peace Jam International.
.
According to a university official, Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations, "basic background research" about Tutu turned up "some red flags" concerning "some things that (Tutu) had said about Israel."
Hennes told a St. Paul newspaper he made some inquiries, including one to a spokeswoman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The organization's representative called Hennes' attention to a speech Tutu made in Boston in 2002 that was reportedly critical of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
She also said that Tutu's speech referred to a "powerful" Jewish lobby in the US, which she said invoked a stereotype of Jewish power, and another where he asked aloud if Jews had forgotten that God cares about the downtrodden.
Hennes said it was a "judgment call" made by St. Thomas' president, the Rev. Dennis Dease. "The basic response we got was that (Tutu) had said some things in the past that have been hurtful to the Jewish community," Hennes said. "When we looked at that, we just decided we're not going to invite him."
Tutu's 2002 speech was reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), an international news agency serving Jewish community newspapers and media around the world. But JTA critics, including Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, claim the news agency's reporting was distorted.
A transcript of Tutu's speech reveals he said, "The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal (in the US), and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures? People are scared in (the US) to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? This is God's world. For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosovic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust."
Tutu added, "We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers."
Many other Americans who are critical of Israeli government policies have been similarly criticized. These include former President Jimmy Carter, whose recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," was immediately attacked as being anti-Semitic.
Ironically, unquestioning acceptance of Israeli government policies is virtually unknown in Israel, where political debate tends to be ubiquitous, fractious and highly charged. Many in Israel are far more critical than either Carter or Tutu regarding Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
At the university in St. Paul, the Tutu controversy triggered heated pushback from some faculty members. A professor was stripped of her leadership post at the school's Justice and Peace Studies Program for the way she challenged the administration's decision.
And Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor, who said he was incensed by the Tutu decision, said, "I think the Israeli lobby in our country has been attempting to silence criticisms of Israel in the academic world. That does a disservice to the state of Israel and all Jews," said Davidov, 76, who said he experienced anti-Semitism as a child in Detroit.
He said anyone who criticizes Israel for treatment of Palestinians ends up labeled as anti-Semitic.
Two years ago, St. Thomas - a Catholic diocesan institution founded in 1885 and now the largest private university in Minnesota - hosted an appearance by incendiary
right-wing pundit Ann Coulter. Coulter once said of Muslims, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Coulter spoke at the school to promote her book, "Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right." Her appearance required extra security.
Bishop Tutu's most recent US appearance was as a guest panelist at an event sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative, an organization formed by former President Bill Clinton to bring together leaders from the private and public sectors, religion, science and technology, medicine, and many other specialties, to promote peace, healthcare, educational and other essential services to underdeveloped countries.
Meanwhile, the youth group that proposed Tutu to St. Thomas has moved its conference to another venue -- Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, where the Nobel laureate will speak on April 11.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
HANDLING OF IRAQ REFUGEES BRANDED AN EMBARRASSMENT
By William Fisher
As the government's fiscal year came to an end last week, the Bush Administration had resettled only slightly more than 10 per cent of the 7,000 Iraqi refugees it pledged to help - and an even tinier fraction of the estimated two million men, women and children who have fled to Jordan, Syria and other neighboring countries or the additional two million who have been internally displaced by ethnic and religious violence within their own country.
According to the US State Department, less than a thousand Iraqi refugees were given US asylum in FY 2007. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last September, Ellen Sauerbrey, Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, said the US would arrange US visas for 7,000 Iraqi refugees by September 30. She later revised the goal downward to 2,000.
Those seeking US visas include thousands of Iraqis who worked for the US Government as translators, drivers, cleaners, cooks, and a variety of other occupations. Many of these people live under death threats because of their support for the US-led coalition. The US Department of Labor has recorded the deaths of more than 250 translators alone.
Many experts familiar with this issue attribute the resettlement program's poor performance principally to the failure of the Bush Administration to assign it a higher priority, to bureaucratic inefficiencies, and to fear by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that some of the Iraqi refugees seeking admission to the US may be terrorists.
Eleanor Acer, Director of the Refugee Protection Program for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy organization, told Truthout the number of Iraqis admitted to the US during the past year is "embarrassingly low."
She said, "Given the size and scale of this refugee crisis, and the US's role in Iraq, this country has a moral obligation to step forward and lead efforts to address the plight of Iraqi refugees. The US needs to step up its aid to assist those states that are hosting the overwhelming majority of Iraqi refugees, but it also needs to demonstrate a real commitment to share the responsibility for providing refuge to Iraqis who are at risk."
The two largest destinations for Iraqi refugees -- Jordan and Syria --are currently hosting more than 500,000 and 1.5 million respectively. On a per capita population basis, Sweden has taken in more refugees than the US.
According to Acer, the US announced goal of resettling only 12,000 next year "is signaling that it will provide shelter to a only a tiny - token - number of those in need."
Currently, the DHS has only a handful of interviewers in Jordan and Syria. In a blunt cable to US to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice - leaked to The Washington Post last month -- Ambassador Ryan Crocker called on State and DHS to "at least" double the number of officers to interview asylum seekers who have already fled Iraq for neighboring countries.
But the subject was barely mentioned during the recent Congressional testimonies of Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus on the state of the Iraq War.
According to Secretary Sauerbrey's Senate testimony, "It is clear that the (resettlement) program has felt the impact of post September 11 expansions in the scope of terrorism-related inadmissibility provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). As a result, the Departments of State, Homeland Security and Justice have been engaged in efforts to exercise the inapplicability provision contained in the INA. This means that these amendments do not apply to refugee applications of individuals who pose no security threat to the United States and who we would otherwise wish to approve."
According to Acer, the US "should be able to allocate more officers to do these interviews in a more timely manner. Also there are steps that they can and should take to conduct the security checks in a more timely manner - and if the checks are being delayed because of lack of resources, then more resources are needed."
Acer adds, "The DHS has a desire to ensure that no one who is a security threat gets into the US. That is a critical objective, and everyone agrees with it. But that does not explain why they are not sending MANY MORE officers to Jordan to conduct refugee interviews."
Another major roadblock in the resettlement program is the policy prohibiting asylum-seekers from being interviewed in Iraq before they have been forced to flee to other countries. On this issue, Acer asserts that "It critical for the US to set up a process for interviewing applicants in Iraq. Iraqis who have risked their lives for the US should not be forced to further risk their lives by taking the dangerous trip to leave the country - and given the fact that they may not be allowed to cross the border into Jordan and soon to Syria, they will really have no options."
In her Congressional testimony, Assistant Secretary Sauerbrey said the State Department wishes it could allow as many as 20,000 Iraqis to seek asylum here. Yet she admitted that the difficulty of setting up asylum application centers in Iraq might make it impossible.
The State Department, however, has generally defended its performance. US Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky says "foreign policy pundits" unfairly accuse the Bush Administration of indifference to the plight of Iraqi refugees. Dobriansky says, "We have finalized security protocols enabling us to expedite the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the US," adding that "progress has been made." Ms. Dobriansky points out that the US has funded 30% of the $60 million United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) $60 million Iraq appeal this year. While that totals only $18 million -- up from the $400,000 the US spent to support UN refugee resettlement efforts in 2006 -- Dobriansky says the US "intends" to provide $100 million more.
But there is also ample evidence that bureaucratic roadblocks are in part responsible for the program's lack of progress. For example, Crocker's cable to Rice suggested what he called "real alternatives," such as allowing State Department officers to conduct interviews, arranging DHS interviews by video from Washington or allowing Iraqis who work for the US Embassy to go through the process in Iraq, instead of outside the country.
But in a letter to Crocker the following day, Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of DHS's US Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote that the ambassador's cable "does not reflect an accurate picture" of his department's commitment or performance to date."
Gonzalez disputed many of Crocker's points and blamed the State Department, which has overall responsibility for the US refugee program, and its partner agents, called Overseas Processing Entities. They handle initial security screening, medical examinations, sponsorships and orientation for applicants.
"It is the OPE's capacity to prescreen the Iraqi cases . . . that has been driving the pace of the Iraqi program," Gonzalez wrote. "I can assure you categorically that USCIS has sent refugee officers to conduct every interview requested" by State.
In May the DHS said it was "poised to approve the applications of nearly 60 Iraqis," and that it was adding new screening procedures for Iraqis to "supplement the checks conducted for all refugee applicants."
But the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) editorial page disagrees with the government's claims of progress. It wrote:
"How many Iraqi refugees did the U.S. resettle in 2006? It settled 202. The State Department said it would resettle 7,000 this fiscal year. Halfway through, it has admitted 68. Meanwhile, the U.S. is spending $2 billion per week to wage the war that directly or indirectly has caused four million Iraqis to be forced from their homes. Whether the U.S. resettles 70 or 7,000, it amounts to a drop in the ocean of Iraqi refugees. Iraq's neighbors are inundated and they need meaningful international support to keep their borders open."
The WJS concluded, "it seems a bit tacky for the US undersecretary of state to tout this as an example of American largesse."
Iraqi refugees have placed substantial strains on the economies of Jordan and Syria. Those who have settled in these countries are not allowed to work and are surviving on savings and black market labor. Their children are not allowed to attend school and there is no provision for health care to displaced families.
While Iraq's neighboring countries have generally been cooperative in accepting the large numbers of refugees, the State Department has reported that Syria is now dragging its feet on issuing entry visas to additional DHS interviewers. That claim could not be verified.
Although Jordan was once the refuge of choice for many middle class professionals, in January 2007 Jordan closed its borders to virtually all Iraqi refugees. In recent months, Lebanon has also tightened restrictions on Iraqi refugees and detained and deported some Iraqis. While neither state has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its Protocol, under customary international law, all nations are obligated to refrain from returning refugees to persecution.
The international community also bears some responsibility for the plight of Iraqi refugees, according to a spokesperson for Amnesty International USA. Mary Shaw told Truthout the international community "is failing to adequately address Iraq's growing refugee crisis. Jordan, Syria and other destination sites for Iraqi refugees "lack adequate assistance from other states. Amnesty International calls on other states to do more to assist Syria and Jordan by providing increased financial, logistical, and material support to enable them to meet the needs of the Iraqi refugees, and by accepting more refugees for resettlement."
Meanwhile, some in Congress are seeking a legislative fix. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) have introduced a bill that would provide safe haven to those Iraqis who are at risk because of their work with the United States or with US organizations.
The bill would create a new resettlement category for Iraqi refugees of special humanitarian concern; establish a special immigrant visa for Iraqis who worked directly with the US; require refugee processing in Iraq and in the region; appoint special coordinators for Iraqi refugees; and encourage assistance to countries in the region that host large numbers of Iraqi refugees.
The Iraq refugee numbers stand in sharp contrast to those from the Vietnam era. In 1975, the US airlifted 6,000 Vietnamese out of the country, the first in a series of actions addressing the refugee crisis. A year later, President Carter allowed the resettlement of 14,000 Vietnamese each month. In 1979, the Orderly Departure Program was established. It brought 500,000 Vietnamese into the US. By the program's end in 1994, 250,000 families had been reunited.
The refugees were airlifted out to relocation camps in the US. Then, after undergoing security checks, they were matched by the State Department with US churches, families and civic groups. "To do less," President Ford later recalled of his effort, "would have added moral shame to humiliation."
As the government's fiscal year came to an end last week, the Bush Administration had resettled only slightly more than 10 per cent of the 7,000 Iraqi refugees it pledged to help - and an even tinier fraction of the estimated two million men, women and children who have fled to Jordan, Syria and other neighboring countries or the additional two million who have been internally displaced by ethnic and religious violence within their own country.
According to the US State Department, less than a thousand Iraqi refugees were given US asylum in FY 2007. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last September, Ellen Sauerbrey, Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration, said the US would arrange US visas for 7,000 Iraqi refugees by September 30. She later revised the goal downward to 2,000.
Those seeking US visas include thousands of Iraqis who worked for the US Government as translators, drivers, cleaners, cooks, and a variety of other occupations. Many of these people live under death threats because of their support for the US-led coalition. The US Department of Labor has recorded the deaths of more than 250 translators alone.
Many experts familiar with this issue attribute the resettlement program's poor performance principally to the failure of the Bush Administration to assign it a higher priority, to bureaucratic inefficiencies, and to fear by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that some of the Iraqi refugees seeking admission to the US may be terrorists.
Eleanor Acer, Director of the Refugee Protection Program for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy organization, told Truthout the number of Iraqis admitted to the US during the past year is "embarrassingly low."
She said, "Given the size and scale of this refugee crisis, and the US's role in Iraq, this country has a moral obligation to step forward and lead efforts to address the plight of Iraqi refugees. The US needs to step up its aid to assist those states that are hosting the overwhelming majority of Iraqi refugees, but it also needs to demonstrate a real commitment to share the responsibility for providing refuge to Iraqis who are at risk."
The two largest destinations for Iraqi refugees -- Jordan and Syria --are currently hosting more than 500,000 and 1.5 million respectively. On a per capita population basis, Sweden has taken in more refugees than the US.
According to Acer, the US announced goal of resettling only 12,000 next year "is signaling that it will provide shelter to a only a tiny - token - number of those in need."
Currently, the DHS has only a handful of interviewers in Jordan and Syria. In a blunt cable to US to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice - leaked to The Washington Post last month -- Ambassador Ryan Crocker called on State and DHS to "at least" double the number of officers to interview asylum seekers who have already fled Iraq for neighboring countries.
But the subject was barely mentioned during the recent Congressional testimonies of Crocker and Gen. David H. Petraeus on the state of the Iraq War.
According to Secretary Sauerbrey's Senate testimony, "It is clear that the (resettlement) program has felt the impact of post September 11 expansions in the scope of terrorism-related inadmissibility provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). As a result, the Departments of State, Homeland Security and Justice have been engaged in efforts to exercise the inapplicability provision contained in the INA. This means that these amendments do not apply to refugee applications of individuals who pose no security threat to the United States and who we would otherwise wish to approve."
According to Acer, the US "should be able to allocate more officers to do these interviews in a more timely manner. Also there are steps that they can and should take to conduct the security checks in a more timely manner - and if the checks are being delayed because of lack of resources, then more resources are needed."
Acer adds, "The DHS has a desire to ensure that no one who is a security threat gets into the US. That is a critical objective, and everyone agrees with it. But that does not explain why they are not sending MANY MORE officers to Jordan to conduct refugee interviews."
Another major roadblock in the resettlement program is the policy prohibiting asylum-seekers from being interviewed in Iraq before they have been forced to flee to other countries. On this issue, Acer asserts that "It critical for the US to set up a process for interviewing applicants in Iraq. Iraqis who have risked their lives for the US should not be forced to further risk their lives by taking the dangerous trip to leave the country - and given the fact that they may not be allowed to cross the border into Jordan and soon to Syria, they will really have no options."
In her Congressional testimony, Assistant Secretary Sauerbrey said the State Department wishes it could allow as many as 20,000 Iraqis to seek asylum here. Yet she admitted that the difficulty of setting up asylum application centers in Iraq might make it impossible.
The State Department, however, has generally defended its performance. US Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky says "foreign policy pundits" unfairly accuse the Bush Administration of indifference to the plight of Iraqi refugees. Dobriansky says, "We have finalized security protocols enabling us to expedite the resettlement of Iraqi refugees in the US," adding that "progress has been made." Ms. Dobriansky points out that the US has funded 30% of the $60 million United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) $60 million Iraq appeal this year. While that totals only $18 million -- up from the $400,000 the US spent to support UN refugee resettlement efforts in 2006 -- Dobriansky says the US "intends" to provide $100 million more.
But there is also ample evidence that bureaucratic roadblocks are in part responsible for the program's lack of progress. For example, Crocker's cable to Rice suggested what he called "real alternatives," such as allowing State Department officers to conduct interviews, arranging DHS interviews by video from Washington or allowing Iraqis who work for the US Embassy to go through the process in Iraq, instead of outside the country.
But in a letter to Crocker the following day, Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of DHS's US Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote that the ambassador's cable "does not reflect an accurate picture" of his department's commitment or performance to date."
Gonzalez disputed many of Crocker's points and blamed the State Department, which has overall responsibility for the US refugee program, and its partner agents, called Overseas Processing Entities. They handle initial security screening, medical examinations, sponsorships and orientation for applicants.
"It is the OPE's capacity to prescreen the Iraqi cases . . . that has been driving the pace of the Iraqi program," Gonzalez wrote. "I can assure you categorically that USCIS has sent refugee officers to conduct every interview requested" by State.
In May the DHS said it was "poised to approve the applications of nearly 60 Iraqis," and that it was adding new screening procedures for Iraqis to "supplement the checks conducted for all refugee applicants."
But the Wall Street Journal's (WSJ) editorial page disagrees with the government's claims of progress. It wrote:
"How many Iraqi refugees did the U.S. resettle in 2006? It settled 202. The State Department said it would resettle 7,000 this fiscal year. Halfway through, it has admitted 68. Meanwhile, the U.S. is spending $2 billion per week to wage the war that directly or indirectly has caused four million Iraqis to be forced from their homes. Whether the U.S. resettles 70 or 7,000, it amounts to a drop in the ocean of Iraqi refugees. Iraq's neighbors are inundated and they need meaningful international support to keep their borders open."
The WJS concluded, "it seems a bit tacky for the US undersecretary of state to tout this as an example of American largesse."
Iraqi refugees have placed substantial strains on the economies of Jordan and Syria. Those who have settled in these countries are not allowed to work and are surviving on savings and black market labor. Their children are not allowed to attend school and there is no provision for health care to displaced families.
While Iraq's neighboring countries have generally been cooperative in accepting the large numbers of refugees, the State Department has reported that Syria is now dragging its feet on issuing entry visas to additional DHS interviewers. That claim could not be verified.
Although Jordan was once the refuge of choice for many middle class professionals, in January 2007 Jordan closed its borders to virtually all Iraqi refugees. In recent months, Lebanon has also tightened restrictions on Iraqi refugees and detained and deported some Iraqis. While neither state has signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its Protocol, under customary international law, all nations are obligated to refrain from returning refugees to persecution.
The international community also bears some responsibility for the plight of Iraqi refugees, according to a spokesperson for Amnesty International USA. Mary Shaw told Truthout the international community "is failing to adequately address Iraq's growing refugee crisis. Jordan, Syria and other destination sites for Iraqi refugees "lack adequate assistance from other states. Amnesty International calls on other states to do more to assist Syria and Jordan by providing increased financial, logistical, and material support to enable them to meet the needs of the Iraqi refugees, and by accepting more refugees for resettlement."
Meanwhile, some in Congress are seeking a legislative fix. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) have introduced a bill that would provide safe haven to those Iraqis who are at risk because of their work with the United States or with US organizations.
The bill would create a new resettlement category for Iraqi refugees of special humanitarian concern; establish a special immigrant visa for Iraqis who worked directly with the US; require refugee processing in Iraq and in the region; appoint special coordinators for Iraqi refugees; and encourage assistance to countries in the region that host large numbers of Iraqi refugees.
The Iraq refugee numbers stand in sharp contrast to those from the Vietnam era. In 1975, the US airlifted 6,000 Vietnamese out of the country, the first in a series of actions addressing the refugee crisis. A year later, President Carter allowed the resettlement of 14,000 Vietnamese each month. In 1979, the Orderly Departure Program was established. It brought 500,000 Vietnamese into the US. By the program's end in 1994, 250,000 families had been reunited.
The refugees were airlifted out to relocation camps in the US. Then, after undergoing security checks, they were matched by the State Department with US churches, families and civic groups. "To do less," President Ford later recalled of his effort, "would have added moral shame to humiliation."
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