Iraqi Torture Scandal Touches Highest Levels of NATO

Originally posted at Truthout

A scandal unfolding in Denmark over the transfer of Iraqi prisoners by Danish forces to Iraq authorities, even as they knew they would be tortured, threatens to implicate the current Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formerly prime minister of Denmark from 2001-2009.

The defense ministry in the government of former Prime Minister Rasmussen is charged with withholding its knowledge of Iraqi torture from legislators when a copy of a 2004 inspection at Al Makil prison in Basra was sent to Parliament.

According to an article last month in the Danish paper Politiken, portions of the report describing prisoner abuse were "blacked out," with the reason given that such "information could harm Danish-Iraq cooperation."

Yet, three months before the prison inspection, in May 2004, during a debate in the Danish Parliament concerning Iraqi prisoners, according to the paper Dagbladet Information (English translation here), then-Prime Minister Rasmussen said the government would "disclose information about torture, if the government becomes aware that it occurs." But evidently, this did not occur.

According to The Copenhagen Post, a Danish English-language daily, the July 2004 investigation by Danish Army legal adviser Maj. Kurt Borgkvist revealed that "prisoners in Iraqi prisons had been burned with cigarettes, had their molars crushed and been beaten around their genitals. Some were even missing fingers, Borgkvist reported." The resulting report included photographic evidence, which has been described as "Abu Ghraib-lignende" ("Abu Ghraib-like") by the previous Danish defense minister.

Rasmussen, leader of Denmark's Liberal Party, resigned as prime minister in April 2009 in order to accept a position as NATO's secretary general. Most recently, he was an outspoken supporter of NATO's military support to the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya. Last November, the Liberal Party and its coalition partners lost power for the first time in almost a decade, losing to a coalition led by the Social Democrats. Rasmussen was also a key supporter of the US campaign to go to war in Iraq in 2003, ironically citing in a UN address Iraqi violations of international anti-torture treaties.

The scandal first arose in 2010 from documents released by WikiLeaks in the "Iraq War Logs." A November 2010 article at Ice News reported how a memo released by WikiLeaks described an inquiry by "a Danish Defence Ministry official" regarding "what happened at the American Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after media reports of torture and abuse in 2003." Subsequently, "Danish soldiers continued to hand over prisoners to the facility, however, even after the torture was officially confirmed several months later."

"'That Denmark didn't intervene in time simply shows that someone must have stopped the criticism at the political level', said Social Democratic Defense Spokesman John Dyrby Paulsen. 'That is also why we want an inquiry into all of this', he added."

An October 2010 story in Dagbladet Information noted that "coalition forces share military reports" and "the Danish military has also had access to accounts on Iraqi police methods," indicating that all the coalition forces, Denmark included, "had knowledge of the situation which was consistent with several highly critical warnings from organizations such as The International Red Cross and Human Rights Watch."

A government commission into Denmark's involvement in the Iraq war is expected later this year. The last Danish forces left Iraq last November.

The WikiLeaks logs also revealed that Danish forces in Iraq had been involved in turning greater numbers of prisoners over to the Iraqis than the Danish government had previously revealed.

According to a report at WikiLeaks Press, former Danish Defense Minister Søren Gade previously told the Danish Parliament that Danish troops had only 21 prisoners. But according to the leaked "War Logs," "the actual number of prisoners taken in the period at a minimum of 95. Of these, 62 were handed over to Iraqi authorities, who were well known to be carrying out torture in Iraqi prisons." In reply, the Defense Ministry "argued that the reason for the great disparity between the reported number of prisoners was due to the fact that many of the prisoners had been captured by British troops and that the Danish troops therefore could not be held accountable."

But recent revelations have seen the number of prisoners actually handed over has grown from a later admitted 200 to a reported 500 or more. The higher number surfaced in a memorandum from Defense Chief Gen. Knud Bartels to the new Defense Minister Nick Hækkerup. (Bartels, himself, has recently assumed the position of NATO's Military Committee chairman.)

In a January 2 article, The Copenhagen Post reported that Denmark's former Defense Minister Søren Gade would be called as a witness in an upcoming trial, stemming from a lawsuit by six Iraqis who were arrested in winter 2004 by Danish forces supporting the US-led coalition forces in Iraq. The prisoners were turned over to Iraqi forces and subsequently tortured.

As the Post notes, "According to international law, soldiers may not deliver prisoners of war to another authority they suspect of mistreating or torturing prisoners." This international prohibition is written into the UN Convention Against Torture, which states that no signatory to the treaty can return or refoule any person to a state authority "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

In a January 5 editorial, the Post insisted that "ordering soldiers to turn a blind eye to the likely mistreatment of detainees amounts to a cold-blooded disregard for the well-being of others." The paper called for the Danish military to cooperate with any investigations, "even if that means allowing top brass, former ministers or senior statesmen to be felled in the process."

A further dimension to the scandal concerns not only the number of prisoners involved, but also the ways the Danes tried to hide their culpability.

The Bartels letter to Hækkerup also described, according to Politiken, how "'in a few cases' Iraqi prisoners were illegally handed over to Iraqi authorities and that in many cases Danish troops avoided defence directives by letting British troops detain Iraqis during joint missions in order to avoid responsibility."

The controversy over handing over prisoners to be tortured by Iraqi forces has not been limited to Denmark. Indeed, after the release of the WikiLeaks "Iraq War Logs," numerous reports of such transfers of prisoners, despite knowledge of torture practices, were published in the British and US press.

According to the publication of one of the "Iraq War Logs" by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in at least one case, a US military interrogator threatened a prisoner with being turned over to the notorious Iraqi Wolf Brigade, "where he would be subject to all the pain and agony that the wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees."

Similar charges of coalition forces turning prisoners over for torture in Afghanistan have also raised controversy. Last September, NATO announced it was suspending many such transfers after years of reports of torture by Afghan security and military personnel.

The Obama administration has pointedly refused to initiate any investigations into US torture, while the British government has announced formation of a government commission to look into the torture charges. The British commission, which has yet to begin its work, has been boycotted by human rights groups, who describe the commission as "toothless" and lacking "meaningful, independent" review.

NATO headquarters did not return a request for comment as of press time. In addition, attempts to verify details of "Iraq War Logs" information were stymied by what appears to be an Internet-wide suppression of the formerly available documents.

Note: This posting has been updated to correct the date of Anders Fogh Rasmussen's resignation and the titles of two Danish news publications.

Assassination in Court, U.S. Argues to Make Legal What It’s Always Done

What an incredible era we live in!

Today in federal court, government attorney Douglas Letter argued against a lawsuit brought by both the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) that the U.S. executive power had the right to kill an American citizen abroad, without review by the judiciary. In his argument to drop the suit, brought on behalf of the father of "radical" Muslim cleric Anwar Al-Aulaqi [Awlaki], Letter claimed, "If we use lethal force we do so consistent with the law."

According to the Christian Science Monitor story on today's proceedings:

The lawsuit does not seek to prevent the government from carrying out targeted killings. Instead, the ACLU is asking Judge Bates to examine the government’s criteria for placing Awlaki on the alleged kill list.

To justify lethal action, the ACLU suit says, the government must be able to demonstrate that the targeted killing is necessary to prevent a direct and imminent threat to public safety. In addition, the suit says, the government must be able to show there are no non-lethal options available to neutralize a threat from Awlaki.

According to a joint press release by ACLU and CCR:

"If the Constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state," said Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU, who presented arguments in the case. "It's the government's responsibility to protect the nation from terrorist attacks, but the courts have a crucial role to play in ensuring that counterterrorism policies are consistent with the Constitution."

Chickens and Coincidences

It seems strongly coincidental that on the day of the hearing, a new Awlaki video should appear on the scene, courtesy of the dubious SITE Institute, remembered for their unveiling of another timely video, the 2007 Osama bin Laden 9/11 statement, which featured a robotic, unmoving bin Laden, which even MSNBC questioned as faked. Then there was that Gainsville, Georgia chicken farm, whose lawsuit against SITE is still pending, accused by SITE of funneling money to terrorists. SITE's founder Rita Katz delivered one of the more memorable of all "war on terror" quotes when she told 60 Minutes, ""Chicken is one of the things that no one can really track down."

Now SITE is back, with a new name (from SITE Institute to SITE Intelligence Group), with a new fire-snorting Awlaki video, just in time for the government's arguments to dismiss the suit that would challenge the government's right to kill the U.S.-born cleric, supposedly hiding out in Yemen, a leader of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninula (AQAP). The New York Times led the way with a blog story by Robert Mackey this morning, "Kill Americans, Says Yemeni-American Cleric." The story followed the news last week that You Tube had removed all of al-Awlaki's videos from its site. Mackey references SITE and their new Awlaki video, while blandly noting that Monday was the day "a federal judge will hear arguments in a lawsuit brought by civil libertarians who claim that the Obama administration does not have the right to order the targeted assassination of Mr. Awlaki and other suspected militants." Gee, what a coincidence the headline for that same Monday article quotes the same Mr. Awlaki as inciting the killing of Americans. As is often the case, the rest of the U.S. press stood up and saluted as the Times sent the story up the proverbial flagpole.

"How popular will Anwar al-Awlaki's latest video be?" asks the Christian Science Monitor. CNN weighed in, too: "U.S.-born cleric rails against Yemen, Iran, United States." Paula Kruger at Australia's ABC was not to be outdone, however, with a headline clanging in its clarion call of danger: "US-born cleric calls for death of all Americans."

ANWAR AL-AWLAKI (translation): Do not seek any permission when it comes to the killing of the Americans. Fighting the devil doesn't need a religious edict, deliberation, prayer or guidance. They are the party of the devil and fighting them is the personal duty of our times.

We reach that moment when it is either us or them. We are two opposites that will never meet. They want something that cannot happen unless they wipe us out. This is a decisive battle. This is a battle of Moses and pharaoh; this is a battle of righteousness and falsehood.

"We reach that moment when it is either us or them." Well, if it was your head being hunted by the CIA or the Pentagon's JSOC Special Forces assassination squads, you might see the world that way, too. In fact, the blurriness of right and wrong is only made worse by the U.S. assertion that it can kill whomever it wants to, irregardless of constitutional niceties, if only it can claim the right is somehow lodged in the 9/11-inspired Authorization for Use of Military Force. Congress has rubber-stamped the AUMF for years now, and President Obama dutifully pressed it upon a Democratic Party-controlled House and Senate... well, once controlled, as Democratic Party lassitude in the wake of the worst economic recession, if not depression, in sixty years saw their short lived ascendancy in both houses of Congress come crashing down around their well-deserving heads.

Mackey at the Times makes sure we don't forget that Awlaki is associated with AQAP, which smuggled -- no doubt in Mackey's mind -- those bomb packages on freight cargo jets last month. And he notes that a Yemeni judge has issued an order for Awlaki's capture. But, in the tradition of open-mindedness so bally-hooed around the Times, he gives the final word to legal pundit Jonathan Turley, who noted last August:

If a President can unilaterally kill a U.S. citizens on his own authority, our court system (and indeed our constitutional rights) become entirely discretionary. The position of the Administration contains no substantial limitations on such authority other than its own promise to make such decisions with care.

Bathed in Blood

"War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade," wrote the Romantic English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley almost 200 years ago now. But one can only look back to an interesting story in the London Times to gain another kind of perspective on the current events surrounding the obscene U.S. argument for assassinating its own citizens without due process, of running hit teams and killing or death lists.

In 1976, journalist Peter Watson was at a NATO conference in Oslo, when a U.S. Navy psychologist, Dr. Thomas Narut, from the U.S. Naval Hospital in Naples told Watson and New Jersey psychologist Dr. Alfred Zitani, that the Navy sought men to train as assassins in overseas embassies. The following is from the London Sunday Times, "The soldiers who become killers," September 8, 1974, but reproduced from a conspiracy site, as the original, and most references to it, plentiful even when I first read about it some years ago, are limited now to a few dozen conspiracy sites. The story is also told at some length in Watson's book (out of print), War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology, published by Basic Books in 1978.

[Narut's] naval work involved establishing how to induce servicemen who ma[y] not be naturally inclined to kill, to do so under certain conditions. When pressed afterwards as to what was meant by "combat readiness units," he explained this included men for commando-type operations and - so he said - for insertion into U.S. embassies under cover, ready to kill in those countries should the need arise. Dr. Narut used the word "hitmen" and "assassin" of these men.

The method, according to Dr. Narut, was to show films specially designed to show people being killed and injured in violent ways. By being acclimated through these films, the men eventually became able to dissociate any feelings from such a situation. Dr. Narut also added that U.S. Naval psychologists specially selected men for these commando tasks, from submarine crews, paratroops, and some were convicted murderers from military prisons. Asked whether he was suggesting that murderers were being released from prisons to become assassins, he replied: "It's happened more than once."

The story goes into various mind-control methods by which the training was done. The Pentagon denied the story, and also wouldn't allow Watson access to interview personnel at the U.S. Naval Neuropsychiatric Center in San Diego, where the training was supposedly done. The whole tale might seem fantastic, unless one remembered that the U.S.-sponsored Phoenix Program in Vietnam was responsible for the assassination of 20,000 or more people in the 1960s. The U.S. also supplied assassination lists to the Indonesian government during the bloody 1965 coup that slaughtered half a million people.

“For the first time, U.S. officials acknowledge that in 1965 they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of Communist operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to the U.S. officials,” Kathy Kadane wrote for South Carolina’s Herald-Journal on May 19, 1990. [Kadane's article also appeared in the San Francisco Examiner on May 20, 1990, the Washington Post on May 21, 1990, and the Boston Globe on May 23, 1990.]

The Indonesian mass murder program was based in part on experiences gleaned by the CIA in the Philippines. “US military advisers of the Joint US Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) and the CIA station in Manila designed and led the bloody suppression of the nationalist Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan,” notes Roland G. Simbulan (Covert Operations and the CIA’s Hidden History in the Philippines).

[Lt. Commander Narut evidently died in 1994, and was buried in Orlando, Florida.]

The history of the United States and assassination, post-World War II, and particularly from the 1960s on, has been a sorry tale of botched public attempts (as of Castro), and a bloodbath dealt by U.S. proxy death squads, and if we can believe the Watson story, by deep cover U.S. assassins themselves. In 1976, in the wake of the many revelations about U.S. government crimes, including assassinations, President Gerald Ford issued a presidential directive (EO 11905) banning assassinations, a directive whose basic premises lie in shreds after ten years of Bush/Obama rule.

It would be remiss not to note in this context the blood bath that is U.S. history on the subject, not to bring up Phoenix, and all the rest of it. Recent revelations in the Iraq logs Wikileaks cache of documents suggests that the U.S. helped form torture squads, and perhaps death squads in Iraq. In any case, they certainly turned thousands of prisoners over to Iraqi forces they knew from hundreds of observations were torturing prisoners, often to death. This deliberate war crime, a direct violation of the Convention Against Torture treaty, was conducted under both the Bush and Obama administrations. But where in our society is the outrage? The society cannot seems to pick itself up out of the muck of triviality and standard party politics and cable TV scandal-mongering.

So forgive me if I don't jump on the bandwagon to talk about Bush and his approval of waterboarding claims. Is he smug? Of course he's smug, because Americans have been ignoring news about torture and assassinations on behalf of the ruling elite for decades now. I don't know what it will take to turn such a historical situation around. Looking at the young and those vulnerable to such confusions as massive societal hypocrisy can allow, one can understand why some have turned even to radical Islam. But I can't recommend it. I'd like to see the young take up the banner that was once Percy Shelley's: free love, hatred of tyrannies, including -- if not especially -- the tyranny of one's own state, and equality of all sexes, peoples, religious practice (including atheism), and add to it the wisdom of a century's struggle for economic justice and against the exploiters of mankind.

But for now, all forward-seeking and progressive individuals should be backing the CCR/ACLU lawsuit, because if the U.S. gets its way, tomorrow it may not be the unsavory Awlaki, it may be you or me. And anyone who was forced to study history a semester or two knows that to be true.

Cross-posted from Firedoglake

Gladio: A Conspiracy So Large, It's Time You Learned About It

I am pleased to link here the 1992 three-part BBC documentary by Alan Francovich, Gladio. Utilizing interviews from the many European and American principals involved, the documentary relates the story of the biggest "conspiracy" of our time (are you listening, Cass Sunstein?) -- the existence of a covert terrorist network maintained throughout Europe by NATO, which utilized terrorism in an effort to discredit the political left.

These "stay-behind" networks originally were built up by recruiting fascists from the countries the U.S. and Britain occupied, meant to be a bulwark against a possible and feared Soviet invasion after World War II. When the invasion never occurred, the networks were not dismantled, but took on a different mission: to keep the left from gaining power in any of these states, from Sweden and Belgium to France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere.

The existence of secret "stay-behind" armies and groups, known today by the Italian name, Gladio, caused a sensation in the early 1990s, when they were revealed by then-Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. Since then, Gladio-like operations, supposedly ran by the CIA and to some extent the British MI6, have been linked to a number of terrorist attacks, assassinations, and right-wing coups in Europe, e.g., the Bologna train station bombing in 1980, the 1967 generals coup in Greece, etc.

The sensationalistic charges have fed a number of conspiracy theories, particularly those around the existence of "false flag" government operations. Some have indicated they see the 9/11 attacks in this light, though I can't say I have the kind of evidence to make such an assertion. But one can understand how any individual might come to seriously mistrust the U.S. government after learning of the Gladio history, which is extensive and well-documented.

Among other canards the Gladio story can put to rest is the silly belief that no large scale conspiracies can exist, at least in a so-called open, democratic society such as ours. And yet, Gladio proves that is not true. In fact, since the revelations of the early 1990s, there has been practically no discussion of this crucial aspect of contemporary history by U.S. historians or policy makers. The existence of this huge conspiracy and intervention against sovereign European states is almost never even referred to by the vast majority of political commentators, left or right, in the United States. I don't see how anyone can intelligently discuss modern European politics without understanding the Gladio revelations and the fallout from them in the various European countries.

More Documentation on Gladio

The first academic examination of Gladio was published in 2005 by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. Mr. Ganser is currently a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. His book, NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, is available at last at not too outrageous a price at Amazon, and likely other book outlets.

(Caveat emptor! The paperback version was said to be unavailable, leaving only the $190 hardback edition! However, there is a Kindle version available for under $40. And moreover, clicking on a link on the latter page brings me to another Amazon page that lists the paperback as available, with new and used copies from $41 on down.)

Another excellent book that delivers a good deal of research on Gladio comes from British journalist Philip Willan, who writes for the UK Guardian and other papers: Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy.

I can't say that I have mastered the above material. Nor am I sure how exactly this aspect of American and European history is being played out even now. I do know that it much too large a story, with way too many ramifications to be ignored. In fact, from a historian's standpoint, or that of any commentator on the events of the past fifty or sixty years, it appears that many of the assumptions about the world we live in are seriously called into question.

At the end of this posting are some links to other online sites of interest, as we begin to assimilate this gigantic story, one which until recently, has been kept from the American people -- outside of small websites, chat rooms, or in the comments of blog readers who get labeled as "conspiracy nuts." Some of the latter are intemperate and have not really examined the proof for many of their statements. But Gladio is not one of those instances. It is a true conspiracy, by men and women at the highest levels of our society. It was kept secret for decades. By indifference and neglect, it is kept out of public consciousness even now.

Part One - ="The Ringmasters"



Part Two - "The Puppeteers"



Part Three - "The Foot Soldiers"



The Wikipedia entry on Gladio. Not bad, with lots of links.

Selections from Ganser's book

An article on Gladio by Arthur Rowse, formerly at the Washington Post and U.S. News and World Report.

Dr. John Prados, Senior Fellow at The National Security Archive, and who wrote the forward for Ganser's book, discusses Gladio in his book on William Colby, which one can read in part at Google Books.

The ongoing ramifications of Gladio in Turkey, where the "stay-behinds" or embedded secret organization (take your pick) is called Ergenekon.

US 'supported anti-left terror in Italy'
Report claims Washington used a strategy of tension in the cold war to stabilise the centre-right
Philip Willan, UK Guardian, 24 June 2000, page 19

Will Obama's Afghan War Spark Its Own Antiwar Movement?

According to multiple accounts, as the White House leaks the news, building up to his speech at West Point on Tuesday, President Barack Obama, channeling a dead president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and mimicking a live one, George W. Bush, will be calling for an escalation in the Afghanistan War. The administration is said to be considering sending 30-35,000 troops to join the 68,000 U.S. troops already deployed there.

Famously, Obama's head general in Afghanistan, former Special Forces General McChrystal -- a man implicated in torture and war crimes -- had called for 40,000 new troops to fulfill his counterinsurgency plans. It appears that some NATO countries -- primarily Britain, Slovakia, Turkey, Georgia, South Korea and tiny Montenegro -- are positioned to make up the shortfall in troops by adding another four to six thousand, up from the approximately 36,000 non-U.S. troops in the NATO force.

But, according to a posting by fflammeau at Firedoglake, top NATO member Germany is balking:

Days before President Obama escalates the American presence in Afghanistan, Germany’s military chief of staff (General Wolfgang Schneiderhan) and his top aide (Peter Wichert) have resigned over accusations that the German military suppressed evidence of the death of dozens of civilians in an airstrike that killed 142 people. General Schneiderhan’s resignation not only is shaking the Merkel government in Germany, it has raised resistance in Germany (and perhaps other Nato countries) to their involvement in Afghanistan just as Obama seeks more troops from them. In late breaking news... reported by the authoritative Deutsche Welle, top politicians in Germany are now calling for a rethink of their role in Afghanistan and a quick exit strategy. In short, the Germans appear reluctant to play "the poodle role" to Obama.

The U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have never been about getting Saddam Hussein, or stopping the Taliban, or helping women achieve literacy. They have been about projecting U.S. dominance in that portion of the world, and was made possible by the collapse of Soviet power in the early 1990s.

Since then, China and the European allies (except Britain) have not been especially happy about the expansion of the U.S. in the newly "unipolar" world, but put up with it for the time being. But the writing is on the proverbial wall: sooner or later, Germany, and possibly France and Italy, will tire of U.S. "leadership", and feel they are not getting their piece of the world pie. This re-eruption of European imperialist ambition will mark a new and dangerous chapter in modern foreign affairs. The "terrorist" enemy of today, who themselves replaced the old specter of a soulless Red Army galumphing over Western Europe, will in the future become fear of a new Chinese Red Army, or a reincarnated Wehrmacht, all intent on destroying "our way of life."

Fox News Chides the Left

Meanwhile, Fox News, which like the broken clock gets it right about two times a day, has published an article salivating over both the inevitable pushback against Obama on the Afghan War issue from the Democratic Party's left wing, and also the likely tepid antiwar response from this same group. Quoting Paul Kawika Martin, political director for Peace Action, Fox writer Stephen Clark writes:

The White House has said that the U.S. won't be in Afghanistan for another eight or nine years. But that won't satisfy liberals, Martin said.

Even though Obama's announcement is sure to reawaken the anti-war movement, Martin said, the protests won't be as intense as they were in the Bush era because the movement has been weakened by the economic recession -- some organizations have shed up to 40 percent of staff in the past year, he said -- and is distracted by the national health care debate. He also said many members of the movement voted for Obama and trust him more than the Bush administration.

"So you don't have that same type of anger," he said.

I don't know Martin or his group, so I don't know how reliable they are as a voice of the left, but I do know that the Democratic Party left has fallen down on the torture issue, once Obama indicated that it was time to "look forward" and not "backwards". A small coterie of liberal bloggers, and the nation's top civil liberties groups, opposed this capitulation and still fight bravely on (see the ACLU's latest batch of FOIA docs on the destroyed CIA torture tapes, and some analysis by Marcy Wheeler here and here), but after some desultory hearings about having hearings by Senator Leahy last March, Congress turned to other issues, turning their backs aggressively on those who have been tortured.

While the left hasn't fielded a large-scale antiwar demonstration in years -- really since the beginning of the current Irag war -- there have been some protests. Antiwar and peace groups have not disappeared, and some very intelligent writing in opposition to the escalation of the war in Afghanistan has been published of late (see the latest from David Dayen, which notes the opposition to the war from Democrat Bill Hedrick, or Derrick Crowe, or Glenn Greenwald, not to mention the incomparable Chris Floyd).

But the old antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s was spearheaded by a generation of leftists who are no longer on the scene: Stalinists and Maoists, Trotskyists and social-democrats, pacifists and anarchists. If there are some remnants (World Can't Wait gets a hefty amount of organizational drudge work -- and enthusiasm -- from the rank and file of Bob Avakian's old Revolutionary Communist Party), the left as a whole is anemic, and if one is looking for antiwar fervor from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's Congressional Democrats, they will be strain their necks from searching. The most "radical" proposition coming from those ranks is a threat to raise a surtax to pay for Obama's war campaign.

Fox News forgot one important point. The escalation of the Afghanistan War will not work, not even by the standards of the U.S. military. But the current crop of military leaders, and their civilian hangers-one, are drunk on their vision of a unipolar world, led by the progeny of West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, and feeling almost omnipotent, having gotten away with waging a totally illegal war, and spread torture across dozens of countries, all while the populace back home indicated a persistent proclivity for indifference (or fearful complacency, which amounts to the same thing in the end).

Whether Obama is the tool of the hawks, or playing along for time, or even really believes the Global War on Terror inanity (and yes, right-wingers, I know there are dangerous terrorists; they just aren't enough of a danger to anywhere come near changing political and military reality to the degree it has changed, e.g. Patriot Act, torture, invading and destroying other countries), whatever Obama's own intentions are almost doesn't matter.

Days before President Obama escalates the American presence in Afghanistan, Germany’s military chief of staff (General Wolfgang Schneiderhan) and his top aide (Peter Wichert) have resigned over accusations that the German military suppressed evidence of the death of dozens of civilians in an airstrike that killed 142 people. General Schneiderhan’s resignation not only is shaking the Merkel government in Germany, it has raised resistance in Germany (and perhaps other Nato countries) to their involvement in Afghanistan just as Obama seeks more troops from them. In late breaking news... reported by the authoritative Deutsche Welle, top politicians in Germany are now calling for a rethink of their role in Afghanistan and a quick exit strategy. In short, the Germans appear reluctant to play "the poodle role" to Obama.

The U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have never been about getting Saddam Hussein, or stopping the Taliban, or helping women achieve literacy. They have been about projecting U.S. dominance in that portion of the world, and was made possible by the collapse of Soviet power in the early 1990s.

Since then, China and the European allies (except Britain) have not been especially happy about the expansion of the U.S. in the newly "unipolar" world, but put up with it for the time being. But the writing is on the proverbial wall: sooner or later, Germany, and possibly France and Italy, will tire of U.S. "leadership", and feel they are not getting their piece of the world pie. This re-eruption of European imperialist ambition will mark a new and dangerous chapter in modern foreign affairs. The "terrorist" enemy of today, who themselves replaced the old specter of a soulless Red Army galumphing over Western Europe, will in the future become fear of a new Chinese Red Army, or a reincarnated Wehrmacht, all intent on destroying "our way of life."

Fox News Chides the Left

Meanwhile, Fox News, which like the broken clock gets it right about two times a day, has published an article salivating over both the inevitable pushback against Obama on the Afghan War issue from the Democratic Party's left wing, and also the likely tepid antiwar response from this same group. Quoting Paul Kawika Martin, political director for Peace Action, Fox writer Stephen Clark writes:

The White House has said that the U.S. won't be in Afghanistan for another eight or nine years. But that won't satisfy liberals, Martin said.

Even though Obama's announcement is sure to reawaken the anti-war movement, Martin said, the protests won't be as intense as they were in the Bush era because the movement has been weakened by the economic recession -- some organizations have shed up to 40 percent of staff in the past year, he said -- and is distracted by the national health care debate. He also said many members of the movement voted for Obama and trust him more than the Bush administration.

"So you don't have that same type of anger," he said.

I don't know Martin or his group, so I don't know how reliable they are as a voice of the left, but I do know that the Democratic Party left has fallen down on the torture issue, once Obama indicated that it was time to "look forward" and not "backwards". A small coterie of liberal bloggers, and the nation's top civil liberties groups, opposed this capitulation and still fight bravely on (see the ACLU's latest batch of FOIA docs on the destroyed CIA torture tapes, and some analysis by Marcy Wheeler here and here), but after some desultory hearings about having hearings by Senator Leahy last March, Congress turned to other issues, turning their backs aggressively on those who have been tortured.

While the left hasn't fielded a large-scale antiwar demonstration in years -- really since the beginning of the current Irag war -- there have been some protests. Antiwar and peace groups have not disappeared, and some very intelligent writing in opposition to the escalation of the war in Afghanistan has been published of late (see the latest from David Dayen, which notes the opposition to the war from Democrat Bill Hedrick, or Derrick Crowe, or Glenn Greenwald, not to mention the incomparable Chris Floyd).

But the old antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s was spearheaded by a generation of leftists who are no longer on the scene: Stalinists and Maoists, Trotskyists and social-democrats, pacifists and anarchists. If there are some remnants (World Can't Wait gets a hefty amount of organizational drudge work -- and enthusiasm -- from the rank and file of Bob Avakian's old Revolutionary Communist Party), the left as a whole is anemic, and if one is looking for antiwar fervor from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's Congressional Democrats, they will be strain their necks from searching. The most "radical" proposition coming from those ranks is a threat to raise a surtax to pay for Obama's war campaign.

Fox News forgot one important point. The escalation of the Afghanistan War will not work, not even by the standards of the U.S. military. But the current crop of military leaders, and their civilian hangers-one, are drunk on their vision of a unipolar world, led by the progeny of West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs, and feeling almost omnipotent, having gotten away with waging a totally illegal war, and spread torture across dozens of countries, all while the populace back home indicated a persistent proclivity for indifference (or fearful complacency, which amounts to the same thing in the end).

Whether Obama is the tool of the hawks, or playing along for time, or even really believes the Global War on Terror inanity (and yes, right-wingers, I know there are dangerous terrorists; they just aren't enough of a danger to anywhere come near changing political and military reality to the degree it has changed, e.g. Patriot Act, torture, invading and destroying other countries), whatever Obama's own intentions are almost doesn't matter.

The real direction of American politics and society is being decided in this next period. Will it follow the road of Cheney and Bush, albeit with a supposedly kinder face, or will the forces who believe in social justice, world peace, promotion of economic equality, and a fight against the forces of exploitation, torture, and war profiteering, wake up, fight, and realize that failure to act is a profound evil in and of itself? It makes other evil possible.

NATO Airstrike Kills Dozens, Maybe 100s of Afghan Villagers

From Derrick Crowe at The Seminal/FDL:

From Reuters:

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan (Reuters) - NATO forces in Afghanistan were investigating on Friday whether civilians were among scores of people burned to death when they carried out an air strike against two hijacked fuel tankers.

...Kunduz province Governor Mohammad Omar said as many as 90 people were feared killed, burned alive in a giant fireball.

. . . .

AP reports that as many as 40 of the dead were civilians.

As usual:

• NATO Press Release 1: We Jacked Up Them Insurgents, and
• Press Release 2: Whoops, Backpedal.

Crowe adds:

This story is very fluid, and the numbers quoted above are the very conservative estimates. Reports from the scene indicate that few bodies are in one piece. The health minister from Kabul indicates that "Around 200 to 250 villagers were believed to have gathered" around the trucks before the bombs fell, and the trucks were, obviously, highly combustible before hit with ordinance."

Stopping the Pro-NATO, Russophobic Insane War Drive

Billmon has a wonderful essay over at Daily Kos, "Anatomy of A(nother) Fiasco," that says almost everything I ever wanted to say about the Russian-Georgian crisis. That's a good thing, because I don't have the time to write up what I want to say. But that's okay, because you can read it anyway.

Here's some excerpts, but I strongly recommend you go read the entire thing. Send it to your family and friends.

...NATO expansion was passionately supported both by the neocons and the liberal internationalists (i.e. the old New Republic crowd) – and probably more importantly, by the Eastern European émigré lobbies that had clout both with the GOP and with the hawkish "Scoop Jackson" wing of the Democratic Party. And these passionate interest groups did what passionate interest groups usually do: They used their influence to make a legislative end run around an ambivalent but largely detached majority.

In early October 1994, as Congress hurried to adjourn for the mid-term elections, something called the "NATO Participation Act" was introduced.... The measure was quickly attached to a bill authorizing international aid for the war on drugs, unanimously passed by both houses on voice votes, and quickly signed into law by President Clinton. There was no floor debate and, as far as I can tell, virtually no press coverage....

Three years later... Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were formally admitted to NATO – obliging the United States to treat an attack on their territories as an attack upon our own – in other words, an ironclad guarantee that the United States would instantly, automatically, go to war to defend them from any external aggression....

In an rational world, in which leaders balance competing priorities against limited resources, the 9/11 attacks might have led to a rethink of NATO’s expansion plans. But amid the weird euphoria (or at least, delusions of omnipotence) that seem to have grabbed the Cheney Administration and the entire US foreign policy establishment by the brain stem after 9/11, the campaign to add a baker’s half dozen weak, ethnically divided states to the NATO club actually picked up steam....

You would think that with NATO’s right foot planted firmly on the Black Sea, and its left foot at the gates of St. Petersburg, the new containment doctrine would have reached its natural limits. But the Cheney Administration, again with the full support of the bipartisan enlargement lobby, immediately began to agitate for yet another NATO expansion, to bring such democratic powerhouses as Croatia – recently emerged from its ethnic grudge match with Serbia – and Albania – into the fold. After the "Orange" and "Rose" revolutions put pro-Western leaders in power in the Ukraine and Georgia, those two countries not only were added to the list, but pushed straight to the top of it....

It is (or at least used to be) an established principle that countries with unresolved border disputes make bad candidates for NATO membership – since it creates a risk the alliance will be dragged into grubby territorial disputes under the guise of collective security. It doesn’t exactly help that in Georgia’s case one of the disputed borders was actually drawn by home boy Josef Stalin, who arbitrarily incorporated Abkhazia into the Georgian Soviet Republic in 1931....

Once again, the US enlargement lobby sprang into action. In February of last year, with the newly born Democratic Congress still waiving its little arms and spitting up mucus, Dick Lugar (the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) and Joe Biden (the committee’s nominally Democratic chairman) introduced the "NATO Freedom Consolidation Act". Like its predecessors, the bill authorized the President to immediately begin treating the Ukraine and Georgia as full-fledged NATO allies in all but name – with weapons sales, military advisors, etc. Senate cosponsors included Chris Dodd of Connecticut, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Gordon Smith of Oregon, and, naturally, John McCain (R-POW).

Also like its predecessors, the bill was whisked through both houses of Congress with about as much deliberation as a resolution praising the Future Farmers of Benton County for their fine showing at the Iowa State Fair – with no hearings, no debate, no roll call votes. President Bush signed it into law on April 9, 2007. The White House put out an official statement marking the occasion. It was one sentence long.

And so, with an absolute minimum of democratic process, the United States of America committed its full prestige and power (if not, just yet, a legally binding guarantee) to the defense of the two former Soviet republics, even though the Russians have repeatedly stated that they regard NATO membership by either country as a direct threat to their own vital security interests....

Looking at this dreary legislative record (which reads like something out of the old Supreme Soviet) is it any surprise Georgia’s president felt he had a virtual carte blanche from America to challenge the Russians – up to an including the use of military force in a disastrous bid to reconquer South Ossetia? Why would he think otherwise – that is, until the moment when he discovered that America had written him a check it had no real intention of honoring?

There's not much more to say - except that it’s a pretty strange world where the sworn goal of US diplomacy is to put the country in a situation where it may have to go to war with another nuclear power (or back down ignominiously) to defend the sanctity of borders drawn by Josef Stalin and Nikita Krushchev. Leaving aside the raving hypocrisy (Kosovo, Iraq) it’s an alarming sign that the national security and foreign policy elites of this country – in both parties; and not just among the lunatic neocon fringe – are totally out of control....

The national security state is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but without any of the external checks and counterbalances that existed during the Cold War – the war it was originally created to fight. The domestic political system, meanwhile, has atrophied to the point where it’s simply an afterthought – a legislative rubber stamp needed to keep the dollars flowing. With no effective opposition, the machine can run on autopilot, until it finally topples off a cliff (as in Iraq) or slams into an object (like the Russian Army) that refuses to get out of the way.

And that, ultimately, is the most depressing thing about this story: Even after the fiasco in Iraq, the bloody failure in Lebanon, the downward spiral in Afghanistan and, now, the futile posturing in Georgia, there’s absolutely no evidence the US foreign policy elite is inclined to moderate its ambition to re-organize the world along American lines. Nor is there any sign the political class (including, unfortunately, Barack Obama) is rethinking its lockstep support for that agenda. The voters, meanwhile, don’t seem to care much one way or another – as long as gas doesn’t get too expensive and the military casualties aren’t too high (or can be kept off the TV). If anything, it looks like bashing the Russians is still good politics, if only for the nostalgia value.

I don't re-publish long quotes from other blogs without good reason. This is an excellent history of the NATO expansionist policy that threatens world peace. It isn't comprehensive. There's nothing in it about the U.S. push to station forward missiles in Poland, for instance, which brought a warlike riposte recently from a Russian general; or the fact that many Europeans oppose this U.S. move. Nor is Billmon's piece an essay on the complex history of South Ossetia or Abkhazia's independence struggles vis-a-vis Georgia. But it is an excellent examination of the bankruptcy of the U.S. political process, and its by-now total dependence upon the interests that lie behind the national security state. It's recommended reading.

Georgian Conflict Manipulated by U.S./NATO/Russia

With the advance of Russian troops and tanks into the Georgian city of of Gori, and the accompanying denunciation of the Bush Administration, which seeks a UN Security Council condemnation of the move, the crisis around the South Ossetia-Georgia conflict seems primed to enter a new, more dangerous stage.

The U.S. says there's no chance they will intervene militarily (but who knows what kind of CIA covert operation is in the offing), and the Germans are trying to be some kind of peace broker. Meanwhile, the latest breaking news via BBC is that the Georgians have totally pulled out of South Ossetia, and Russian forces occupy Tskhinvali.

But make no mistake: this is a very complex and dangerous situation. To even pose it as "now" Russian tanks are rolling in is to echo U.S./Nato propaganda.

The South Ossetian province of Georgia is not ethnically Georgian. They have sought their independence and/or autonomy from Georgia for some time now. (Think of Georgia as a kind of baby Russia, with its own oppressed ethnic groups.)

It was Georgia that reneged on an autonomy agreement and referendum with South Ossetia. (There is another breakaway Georgian province in the mix, too: Abkhazia.) On the other hand, Georgia has been a victim of "great Russian chauvinism" ever since Tsarist times. Lenin, just before his death, failed to out-maneuver Stalin on the question of national sovereignty for the then-new "Soviet Georgian Republic," who pressed forceable "union" between Soviet Russia and Georgia (and other former Russian provinces). The abuse of national rights by a portion of the Bolshevik party got so bad that Lenin asked Stalin to be removed as General Secretary of the Communist Party, in order to push a reassessment of national relations between Soviet Russia and its neighbors -- one that would respect the national sovereignty of other countries. But Lenin died suddenly, and the request to remove Stalin and change relations with Georgia was suppressed, only to surface years later as part of the famous Khrushchev revelations.

Now, both Russian and the U.S./NATO are cynically utilizing the conflict as a proxy for their own great power confrontation. This is dangerous posturing, similar to the use of the Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks and Greeks in the Balkan Wars that preceded World War I. The lust for U.S. dominance in every corner of the world is the major destabilizing factor of our time. In the east, it has stirred up the hornet's nest of radical Islamic fundamentalism (after first courting the very same insurgents it supported against a then Westernizing Soviet Union, and then abandoning them).

In old Europe, nationalist and revanchist causes rooted in centuries-old resentments and inequalities are being cynically manipulated by the U.S. and NATO allies and Russia. The last time such matchsticks were lit within Europe itself we witnessed the horror of the Bosnian War, with its genocide, concentration camps, and massive relocation of displaced civilians. The time before that... World War I.

From the UK Guardian:

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president turned prime minister, in his public statements seemed to put more importance on Georgia's ambitions to join Nato. At its summit in Bucharest this year, Nato agreed that Georgia would become a member of the western military alliance, which would not have gone down well with the Kremlin.

What is not in dispute is that Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, overplayed his hand or walked into a Russian trap, but that is almost besides the point. James Sherr, an analyst at the Chatham House thinktank, argues that what the episode shows is Russia's determination to protect its owns interests whatever it takes....

On Politico, Ben Smith looks at how Barack Obama and John McCain, the two US presidential hopefuls have reacted to the crisis. He notes that Obama took a very mainstream position, calling for negotiations, but that McCain took a much more confrontational stance towards Russia.

Then we have this from Steve Clemons at The Washington Note on "American culpability" in the crisis:

My own view is that the U.S. has displayed a reckless disregard for Russian interests for some time. I don't like Russia's swing to greater domestic authoritarianism and worry about its stiffened posture on a number of international fronts -- but Simes convinces me in his important Foreign Affairs essay, "Losing Russia," that much of what we are seeing unfold between Russia and Georgia involves a high quotient of American culpability....

By pushing Kosovo the way the US did and aggravating nationalist sensitivities, Russia could in reaction be rationally expected to further integrate and cultivate South Ossetia and Abkhazia under de facto Russian control and pull these provinces that border Russia away from the state of Georgia.

At the time, there was word from senior level sources that Russia had asked the US to stretch an independence process for Kosovo over a longer stretch of time.... The U.S. rejected Russia's secret entreaties and instead rushed recognition of Kosovo and said damn the consequences.

Now thousands are dead. The fact is that a combination of American recklessness, serious miscalculation and over-reach by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, as well as Russia's forceful reassertion of its regional national interests and status as an oil and gas rich, tough international player means America and Europe have yet again helped generate a crisis that tests US global credibility.

With a lame-duck president, as with the war drums beat over Iran, it's hard to know how far Washington will go in pushing a bellicose foreign policy. But the recklessness of a certain element within the Pentagon/CIA/Executive branch establishment, and the obliviousness and cowardice of many other actors there, means that no one should rest easy these days.

Once some people get the taste of war and conquest, they don't like to let go.

New Report Warns "Afghanistan on the Brink"

Reuters has just posted a story that should make Americans stand up and take notice -- assuming they can bestir their self-interested torpor -- as the Senlis Council, a well-respected international think-tank, has released a report, "Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink", which argues the situation in Afghanistan has reached "crisis proportions". This follows the revelations last month from a top British politician and former UN representative in the Balkans that the war in Afghanistan is "lost".

Canadian Television summed up the conclusions in the Senlis report this way (all emphases in quotes throughout are mine):

*** The Taliban are winning hearts and minds in southern Afghanistan; the international community is not. NATO-ISAF troops are forced to fight in an increasingly hostile environment because of the international community’s blunt political errors.
*** The absence of comprehensive development aid plans has given a strategic advantage to the Taliban.
*** Time for a well-planned village by village hearts and minds campaign to re-engage the Afghan population and make NATO’s mission a successful one.

What's that? A "hearts and minds" campaign to "re-engage" the population against the native opposition? Where have I heard that kind of language before?

Meanwhile, the Reuters article elaborates:

If NATO, the lead force operating in Afghanistan, is to have any impact against the insurgency, troop numbers will have to be doubled to at least 80,000, the report said.

Despite the alarms and the suggestions, the Taliban is likely to retake Kabul next year.

Senlis said its research had established that the Taliban, driven out of Afghanistan by the U.S. invasion in late 2001, had rebuilt a permanent presence in 54 percent of the country and was finding it easy to recruit new followers.

It was also increasingly using Iraq-style tactics, such as roadside and suicide bombs, to powerful effect, and had built a stable network of financial support, funding its operations with the proceeds from Afghanistan's booming opium trade.

"It is a sad indictment of the current state of Afghanistan that the question now appears to be not if the Taliban will return to Kabul, but when," the report said.

Putting it all together, we can see that like its neighbor to the east, Pakistan, Afghanistan is headed for greater turbulence and a higher amount of Western intervention -- although perhaps we should drop the polite language and call "intervention" by its real name: invasion.

The "hearts and minds" language, when combined with the call to double troop presence, points to plans for a large-scale military counterinsurgency campaign, as in Vietnam... or in Iraq. Such a campaign cannot really win popular support in the target country, as a prominent international humanitarian representative explains:

David Curtis, head of mission for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Somalia, explains: “When military and humanitarian groups are doing similar work it is hard for people… to differentiate between them. Yet the objectives of the two are utterly dissimilar; humanitarian agencies aid the population without taking sides and based on need, while the US military serve their own political and military objectives alone. The two are incompatible.”

Why U.S./NATO Troops Must Withdraw from Afghanistan

The U.S. "war on terror" has always been a cover for imperialist maneuvering between Western nations, the drive to secure capital markets and natural resources, like gas and oil, and to beat out your opponents while doing it. For instance, despite their putative "alliance," the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K. all have strong reasons to see the other nations of the group as competitors, particularly the U.S. and Germany.

The one thing that keeps them together is a lingering fear of Russia, and the political decision that the time has not yet come to split the alliance (as France almost did five years ago over Iraq). Well, I suppose there's also the profits, as a Daily Kos diarist noted the other day:

More than $20 billion in U.S. Government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone to "... foreign companies whose identities – at least so far – are impossible to determine, according to a new study from the Center for Public Integrity.

The sufferings of the Afghan people has been immense. The Taliban are a truly awful political organization, one which will enslave much of the population in barbaric medieval religious laws and institutions. But the U.S. and its allies are incapable of "liberating" this country, as the predatory Iraq War has made clear to all Muslims in the region.

Only the complete defeat of the political leadership in the U.S. and Europe, and the institution of a new one, dedicated to punishing the militarists, politicians and businessmen, particularly those responsible for the illegal intervention into Iraq and the use of torture throughout the region, will begin the massive repair job needed to truly win the "hearts and minds" of impoverished and oppressed people around the globe. Such an overturn in leadership and political policy will not be without its reflection within the countries undergoing such change, and there will be both pain and sacrifice, and a feeling of liberation and a future free of fear.

For now, 2008 looks to be a year of further defeats on the battlefield for Bush and the neo-cons, followed by strained attempts to ratchet up the military machinery in the most explosive corner of the world. It is not too late to throw out this rancid bunch, but I fear the current political opposition is too subservient, too inured to a sterile electoralist platform, and too afraid, frankly, of necessary change, because too indebted to the large corporations that feed off the military machine, to lead as it should.

The conclusion will be messy, but as always in history, unforgiving, especially for those candidates and politicians that cannot embrace impeachment and immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan -- Withdrawal from Afghanistan?? you cry. Yes. NATO cannot save the anti-fundamentalist opposition in Afghanistan. They are ensuring a Taliban victory. They are irrevocably tainted by war crimes and torture. If a truly domestic opposition is to form and beat the Taliban and the warlords -- and I strongly oppose both Taliban and the vicious warlords and obscurantist mullahs -- then the U.S. and its allies must pull out.

Outrage! NATO Transfers Prisoners to Afghan Torture

The latest in a series of scandals around use of torture by the U.S. and its allies concerns yesterday's revelations by Amnesty International (AI) that Nato-led forces have turned prisoners captured in Afghanistan over to certain torture by that country's intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS). AI specifically named "members of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – particularly those from Belgium, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and Norway."

Today, the executive head of the ISAF troops in Afghanistan, German General Egon Ramms, has confirmed the AI reports, adding NATO had received such reports. Canadian forces had even stopped handing over prisoners in the Kandahar province unless their safety could be vouchsafed. But the spin doctors are already on duty, as Reuters is reporting that a NATO spokesman is denying any "systematic mistreatment or torture of detainees" handed over to Afghanistan authorites.

But Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week ordered authorities to stop torturing suspects in a tacit admission that the practice had been carried out.

Amnesty International's press release gets more specific (and, of course, the full report, "Detainees Transferred to Torture: ISAF Complicity?", even more so):

Over the past two years, Amnesty International has received repeated reports of torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of the NDS, including detainees being whipped, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of food. Many of them have been arrested arbitrarily and detained incommunicado, without access to lawyers and families.

AI dates concerns about detention practices in Afghanistan back to 2002. They cite "failures by all parties to the conflict", including both the U.S. and the Taliban, to meet international norms and obligations regarding prisoners and detention. From the full report:

The two international agreements on the future of Afghanistan - the Bonn Agreement and the Afghanistan Compact - include clear international human rights obligations. Thus the Bonn Agreement provides for the establishment of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission,(14) as well as providing, in Article V(2):

"The Interim Authority and the Emergency Loya Jirga shall act in accordance with basic principles and provisions contained in international instruments on human rights and international humanitarian law to which Afghanistan is a party"..."

The Afghanistan Compact lists "Governance, Rule of Law and Human Rights" among the "three critical and interdependent areas or pillars of activity for the five years from the adoption of this Compact".(16) The Compact provides, among other things, that by 2010:

"Government security and law enforcement agencies will adopt corrective measures including codes of conduct and procedures aimed at preventing arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, extortion and illegal expropriation of property with a view to the elimination of these practices"...

International Cover-Up

Needless to say, this story has been met with deafening silence in the country that initiated "Operation Enduring Freedom". In Canada, there was a more circumspect response from some, with Michael Byers of the Toronto Star opining:

The world's most respected human rights organization has just accused this country of complicity in torture. Canadians should hang their heads in shame....

One alleged victim claimed to have been taken to a room in the NDS compound in Kandahar where "the walls were covered with blood." There, he was hung from a hook on the ceiling and repeatedly beaten into unconsciousness.

As Amnesty International explains, Canada's current reliance on occasional verification visits is misplaced. Monitoring "is a technique to detect torture only after it happens, and cannot substitute for prior precautions that prevent torture from happening in the first place."

The human rights organization also criticizes Canada for downplaying the number of transfers that occur. (emphasis mine)

But the press is one thing, and the State another, and Stephen Harper's Canadian government has announced that endorses NATO's official pronouncement that there is "no evidence" of any such mistreatment given transferred prisoners. [I've been made aware that blueness at Daily Kos wrote a diary on the controversy in Canada over this issue some months ago. It complements the material in this diary very well: "Torture? What Torture?"] Not to be outdone, the Dutch have also backed NATO's see-no-evil stance, and refuse, moreover, to stop handing prisoners over to the NDS until the situation is remedied, as AI is demanding. I guess someone should tell General Ramms to get with the program!

While all this denial can be chalked up to a knee-jerk defensive reaction, all the evidence points to a long-term cover-up. Reading the U.S. State Department's own Human Rights report on Afghanistan, one wonders who ever reads these things, unless you work for AI, Human Rights First, the UN, or some such agency. Certainly NATO personnel haven't read them (except that damn General Ramms). Here's a bit from the last such report, dated March 6, 2007:

In November 2005 Kabul's Police Chief General Abdul Jamil Junbesh, allegedly tortured and killed a civilian named Hussain. In December 2005 police beat and killed a detainee at the Kabul police station. In both cases human rights activists characterized official investigations as ineffective and no formal charges were made....

Complaints of serious human rights violations committed by representatives of national security institutions, including arbitrary arrest, unconfirmed reports of torture, and illegal detention were numerous.

There were allegations that local commanders operated private prisons where they abused individuals in detention, in some cases resulting in their death....

For example, human rights organizations reported that local authorities in Herat, Helmand, Badakhshan, and other locations continued to routinely torture and abuse detainees. Torture and abuse consisted of pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, beatings, sexual humiliation, and sodomy. (emphasis mine)

Not surprisingly, the role of the NDS is never mentioned, unless to place it in a positive light. Also not surprisingly, as a "media alert" by Human Rights First pointed out last March, the U.S. State Department report remains mum on "the detention and interrogation activities of the United States in the country". The U.S. is believed to hold hundreds if not thousands of individuals in uncertain legal status in unknown prisons and holding centers around Afghanistan.

The full AI report details how the ISAF coalition signed Memorandums of Understanding around the transfer of prisoners to the Afghanistan government. These MoUs are routinely have failed to guarantee the rights of transferred detainees. In many cases, it's not even certain to whom a prisoner will be turned over, although AI reports it's usually the NDS.

In practice, however, even the monitoring safeguards contained in such agreements are not met. The AIHRC (Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission) has indicated that it has often been denied access to detention centres run by the NDS, and lacks the resources and capacity to carry out extensive monitoring. An AIHRC Commissioner stated that "the AIHRC has monitored NDS detention centres, but we had to contact them in advance. It is not free access, although recently we received a letter signed by the head of NDS to provide access to AIHRC’s monitors, but this is not happening at the moment…in Kandahar, we have not [been] provided [with] full access and still we don’t feel confident about their full cooperation"...

AI is concerned that provisions in the MoUs governing monitoring are only implemented in part. More fundamentally, the organisation emphasises that - even where carried out by a professional, independent and dedicated organization - visits to places of detention, while constituting a crucial element in the prevention of torture and other ill-treatment, are far from being sufficient on their own. These concerns are reinforced by the experiences of the ICRC in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay – and indeed in relation to Bagram in Afghanistan, where torture and other ill-treatment were inflicted extensively despite ICRC’s regular visits, monitoring of reported abuse and relaying of concerns. (emphases mine)

A "Good" War Goes Rotten

The war in Afghanistan is often positively compared to the travesty of an occupation by the U.S. and its faux-coalition in Iraq. It's supposed to be the "good" war, fighting the Taliban, helping the Afghans, etc. But recent reports from top officials outside the U.S. are saying the war may already be lost. Well, now we can get some idea why. Just as Abu Ghraib belied the supposed U.S. good intentions in Iraq, a similar scandal surfaces in the war everybody is supposed to support. (Not one U.S. politician running for president is calling for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, as far as I can tell.)

One keeps thinking that the scandals around torture can't get any worse. Oh, sure, some of the pictures and videos from Abu Ghraib, showing the worst forms of rape and torture in that prison, have been suppressed. And, yes, the Democrats failed to even discipline their own members to prevent Congressional approval of a new Attorney General for Bush who knows how to read the script on legal double-talk when it comes to U.S. torture. But now the precious adventure in Afghanistan is shown to be an international travesty, with supposed liberal countries like Canada and the Netherlands, complicit in the rendition of detainees to a country that tortures. In this case, it's the same country they are supposedly fighting to protect.

How much tortured can the logic of support for this sick country and the existing international order can it get? When you recover from the vertiginous vertigo instilled by the latest revelation of crimes by this government and its allies, send a letter or email of protest to NATO, asking it to "1. Revise all detainee transfer policies and provide support to member states in the creation of minimum standards regarding detainee transfers for ISAF states operating in Afghanistan; and 2. Work with relevant partners including member states, the EU, UN, ICRC and AIHRC to develop a national plan for the Afghan prison system in line with UN Security Council resolution 1776."

NATO Headquarters
Blvd Leopold III
1110 Brussels, Belgium
natodoc@hq.nato.int

And while you're at it, send a little loving AI's way. (And lest anyone think AI is unfair or one-sided in its coverage, read its April 2007 report, "All who are not friends, are enemies: Taliban abuses against civilians". I haven't bothered to cover it here, as coverage of Taliban atrocities are widely reported already in the mainstream press.)