Author: Helena

“Dannatt effect” spreads to US generals?

Well, what did I say here just seven hours ago?

    But maybe Dannatt’s action was also directed toward encouraging his US counterparts to have a bit more spine in their dealings with their political “masters”? That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?

So then, we had the US military spokesman in Baghdad, Maj.-Gen. William Caldwell saying [BBC] publicly and forthrightly that Operation Forward Together– Gen. George Casey’s recent and much-acclaimed project to “flood the zone” in Baghdad with US troops in order to pacify the city prior to the US election– “ has not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in… violence.”
The NYT’s Michael Luo has more Caldwell:

    In an unusually gloomy assessment, General Caldwell called the spike in attacks “disheartening” and added that the American military was “working closely with the government of Iraq to determine how to best refocus our efforts.”
    It is unclear, however, what other options might be available to American military commanders if their current efforts fail…
    In a worrisome development, General Caldwell revealed Thursday that American troops had to return last week to Dora, a troubled southern Baghdad neighborhood that had been a showcase of the new security plan and was one of the first areas to be cleared.
    A key concern from the outset of the stepped-up patrols in the capital was the difficulty of holding onto areas after they had been cleared. In other troubled areas of the country that American forces have sought to “clear and hold,” like towns along the Euphrates River corridor from west of Baghdad to the Syrian border, military officials have struggled to deal with insurgents simply melting away prior to the arrival of troops, only to return stronger than ever after focused military offensives have been completed. [Very sneaky of them, eh? ~HC]
    In Baghdad, the military has been observing a marked increase recently in sectarian attacks in so-called cleared areas, General Caldwell said, noting that insurgents were “punching back hard.”
    “They’re trying to get back into those areas,” he said. “We’re constantly going back in and doing clearing operations again.”
    General Caldwell also raised the possibility that insurgents have intentionally increased their attacks in recent weeks as a way of influencing political events in the United States.
    “We also realize that there is a midterm election that’s taking place in the United States and that the extremist elements understand the power of the media; that if they can in fact produce additional casualties, that in fact is recognized and discussed in the press because everybody would like not to see anybody get killed in these operations, but that does occur,” he said.
    By almost any measure, the situation in the capital is in a downward spiral. Last month, General Caldwell said in a briefing that suicide attacks were at an all-time high. October is also on track to be the third-deadliest month of the conflict for the American military, with a large portion of the deaths occurring in Baghdad.
    The military on Thursday announced the deaths of two more American troops — a Marine in Anbar province from “enemy action” and a soldier north of Balad from a roadside bomb — bringing the month’s total to at least 72.
    American commanders had predicted a spike in violence during Ramadan, but previous Ramadans have been nowhere near as deadly for American troops as October has been so far.
    Deaths in Baghdad specifically have leaped this month. Anbar province also continues to be deadly for American troops who are trying to root out Sunni insurgents there.
    On Thursday, dozens of black-clad gunmen, toting assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, paraded down a main street in Ramadi, one of the most troublesome cities in Anbar province for American troops. They waved banners identifying them as members of the Mujahedeen Shura Council, an umbrella group for insurgents. The council had recently announced the creation of an Islamic state in the area, independent of the Iraqi government.

Right. Just in case it hasn’t been clear to JWN readers yet: The two parts of Iraq with the highest current levels of violence are the two areas with the highest concentration of US military operations…
Does anybody out there still claim the US has any valid claim whatsoever to be the power that “fixes” what has been broken in Iraq?
… Anyway, I did think it was worth noting the (relative) courage of Gen. Caldwell in speaking so forthrightly in public. However, from my long study of the US military I am 100 percent convinced that he would not have done this without getting explicit instructions to do so from his commanding officer, Gen. George Casey, the commanding officer in Iraq, and also quite possibly from Casey’s boss, Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of Centcom.
In which case, it would have been considerably more gutsy and effective if one of those two more senior generals had personally delivered the same kind of “brutally honest” assessment that, instead, they had their flack Gen. Caldwell deliver. In Britain, remember, it was the army’s very top officer, Gen. Sir Richard Dannatt, who delivered the bad news in public last week.
That was considerably gutsier.
Reuters meanwhile has reported that Gen. Casey had a yet lower-level flack deliver this message today:

    “General Casey has ordered a review of Operation Together Forward. U.S. casualties are a grave concern but that is not driving the review,” Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver said.
    “The enemy is adapting and we have to make changes,” he told Reuters. “This is a constant review process.” He said that General George Casey, who commands the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq ordered the review last week…

Bottom line: Britain’s Dannatt still wins the “Speaking Truth to Power” medal for bravery, hands down.

Blair’s general woes

Last week, the British Army’s chief of staff, Sir Richard Dannatt, caused an uproar when he told interviewer Sarah Sands that, “we should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems…”
Mark Townsend and my old buddy Ned Temko had some great background on the whole Dannatt affair– including the hissy-fit of outrage that came from the US Embassy when news of the interview leaked out– in this piece, which ran in The Observer, last Sunday.
They noted this about reaction to Dannatt’s remarks from people in the British military:

    There was, however, a tangible lift in the body language of the British soldiers swapping banter in the mess tents of Basra and Lashkar Gar, Afghanistan. Those enduring the searing heat and danger of the desert battlefields celebrated a boss who talked the way they thought…
    A poll on an army website asking users whether Dannatt’s comments were right or wrong offers corroboration. By midday yesterday, 97 per cent believed their general was right or practically right with his assessment. No one deemed him wrong. The tone of the entries ranged widely, but the message was unmistakable.
    ‘Thank God – some genuine leadership based on reality,’ said one about their leader.

Since then, Blair’s woes with his mouthy generals have been multiplying.
On Tuesday, Brig. Ed Butler, the outgoing commander of the British forces in Afghanistan told reporters that, “The decision to divert forces to invade Iraq cost the West years of progress in Afghanistan.”
The author of that story, Peter Graff, notes that Britain still has more than 7,000 troops in Iraq, at the same time that it’s providing the overall NATO headquarters in Afghanistan as well as a task force in Helmand province. He continues:

    British commanders acknowledge that running both long-term campaigns has left them with virtually no spare capacity, and they have begged other NATO countries urgently to send more troops and aircraft to Afghanistan, so far with little response.
    Butler said the shortage of aircraft for resupplying his troops meant paratroops at remote forward bases were at times down to “belt rations” — eating only what they could carry.
    “It was very close,” he said.

Butler noted that for now, the latest Taliban offensive in helmand province had been beaten back. But he added: “If we take our eye off the ball and we don’t continue to invest in it then there’s a danger they could come back in bigger numbers next year.”
A lot more anger toward Blair was expressed by Col. (retd.) Tim Collins, who had headed the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Writing in The Daily Telegraph today, Collins says:

    The timescale for any British withdrawal from Iraq will be a complex matter and one wholly dependent on our American and Iraqi allies.
    Observers and commentators have given warning of the danger of failing to robustly pursue the mission in Iraq or face the possibility of actually compounding the problem.
    Three years into the occupation, with no real improvement, it is time to admit failure. That is what the Chief of the General Staff, Gen Sir Richard Dannatt, was doing last week. Indeed the British failure in Iraq may be characterised by history as “ill conceived and without enough effort”.

He notes that the British troops are “now almost confined to barracks.” (I believe that the same is true of the massive numbers of US troops in Iraq, too.)
He concludes thus:

    The British Army has not lost its spine; far from it. But the continued deployment to Iraq, long past any earlier UK estimates, coupled by the muddled state of domestic government in the UK – cuts to military strength whilst liabilities are dramatically increased – has struck at the roots of our military.
    Coupled with the further adventure in Afghanistan, our military has run out of resources. We must win in Afghanistan; our national security and control of the opium on to our streets demands this.
    Iraq was a “nice to do”. The end has come not because of any deeply contemplated policy decision, but because Tony Blair and his mates have driven our military like joyriders in a stolen car. Gen Dannatt has informed them that it has just run out of petrol. Let’s hope they don’t torch it to cover their tracks.

Ouch.
We should note the strategic-level judgment that Collins was expressing there: essentially, that not losing in Afghanistan is more important to (British) national security than not losing in Iraq. It strikes me this is the nub of the issue being debated within the British Ministry of Defence these days.
I wonder if this debate has even been seriously raised yet within policymaking circles in Washington? The resource constraints within the military– mainly, the manpower constraint– seem to have reached a critical point in Britain earlier than they have reached it in the US. But perhaps it is just that the British generals are braver about speaking out in public– where they deem it absolutely necessary– than the many, many highly overpaid flag officers within the US military…
But this issue of “Afghanistan vs. Iraq” is one that will surely require some very focused attention in Washington in the weeks ahead.
On the issue of generals speaking out in democracies, the WaPo’s Eugene Robinson recently roundly criticized Dannatt for having done so. Recalling his time as a correspondent in Brazil in the late 1980s, he argued that generals really should not intervene in politics.
He wrote:

    Dannatt, being correct in his analysis of the situation and properly worried about the state of his army, had two choices: He could have argued his case to Blair privately, or he could have resigned and spoken out publicly. Probably he has already done the former. Had he done the latter, I’d be singing his praises.
    But I don’t like active-duty generals dabbling in politics, even if I agree with them. Dannatt should run for Parliament if he wants to set foreign policy. If I were Blair, I’d advance Dannatt’s political career by relieving him of his current duties.

I am not sure about Robinson’s argument here. I think, firstly, that there’s a large difference between an army chief of staff speaking out in public with a professional assessment of the state of his forces and the strategic challenges ahead, and a chief of staff who stages a coup to seize political power. The Brazil analogy really doesn’t seem to hold much water.
Secondly, I expect that Dannatt was prepared for the prospect that Blair might seek his speedy firing after the publication of the remarks. But he went ahead and uttered therm anyway. Realistically, though, I would say that Dannatt probably assessed his chances of getting fired as low. In essence, that’s because Tony Blair’s political stock– in the country and even within his own party– is so low, and over precisely this isssue of Iraq, too, that he would merely end up making a fool of himself had he tried to fire the general.
But maybe Dannatt’s action was also directed toward encouraging his US counterparts to have a bit more spine in their dealings with their political “masters”? That would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?
Anyway, one final note here. Lewis Page has a strong piece that defends Dannatt’s decision to speak out, on the Propsect mag website. He writes:

    By his oath of attestation, Dannatt is loyal to the Queen, not to Tony Blair or the Labour party. As a practical matter, unwritten like so much of the British constitution, this means that his true superiors are the British public. He has done nothing wrong by giving a professional opinion to his real bosses.
    Sadly, Dannatt’s outspokenness is unlikely to repeated by his successors. Although he will not be openly disciplined for speaking up on this one occasion—because Tony Blair doesn’t want to spend his last months in office conducting a messy purge—once the succession, presumably to Gordon Brown, has taken place, it will probably be business as usual for the civilian-military relationship.
    That will be a bad thing, far more of a danger to the British constitution than any fantastical military rebellion. Openness in government and freedom of speech are even more fundamental than military subordination to civil power, and these vital principles have been under sustained attack for some time now. The elected representatives of the British people voted freely to send our troops into Iraq, after all. They did so principally because all professional advice against the invasion was ruthlessly suppressed. The principle of constitutional loyalty was used to crush all authoritative dissent. An intelligence officer, John Morrison, who dared to speak out in 2004 was summarily fired. It has been made plain to military people that they will suffer the same fate if they ever contradict the party line.
    But the generals at the very top aren’t really afraid of being dismissed, or even passed over…

Good arguments there.

Riverbend on the ‘Lancet ‘study

She’s back… thank G-d.
She put up a post yesterday– her first since August 5– in which she somberly considered the recent Lancet study on Iraqi mortality and the controversy it has generated.
She writes,

    So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.
    The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?
    We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
    There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.
    Let’s pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al….

As for her long absence from the blogosphere, she writes:

    There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I’d be filled with a certain hopelessness that can’t be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.
    It’s very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves…

I am so, so glad she is still alive, and still getting her unique voice out into the world. I can only imagine how hard, how soul-searing and desperate the past few months must have been– for her, and for all other Iraqis.
Bring the US troops home.

Bush reeling from Iraqi “Tet”?

Things are going seriously badly in Iraq this month. For the Iraqis, but also for the Americans. The number of US dead there has now reached 70 since October 1— and we’re still only at October 18.
For every one of these US service members killed, tens must have been wounded very badly indeed. God help them all.
And of course, Iraqis are being killed, in the many different forms of violence now roiling the country, in far, far greater numbers.
At the Iraqi political level, PM Nuri al-Maliki made a double pilgrimage to Najaf today– to see Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and to see Mahdi Army chief Moqtada Sadr. This, after the phone conversation on Monday with President Bush, which– one can conclude– must have left Maliki far from satisfied about the baselessness of the many recent rumors that Washington was considering replacing him.
On coming out from the meeting with Sistani, Maliki stressed that,

    “The Iraqi government is a government of national unity that came to power through the will of the Iraqi people… The Iraqi people are the only authorized party that can remove this government or allow it to continue.”

It seems clear by now that the big gamble the US occupation authorities made in the past siux weeks– that by “flooding the zone” in Baghdad with US troops, they could restore something of a sense of order there before the US elections– has failed. With 147,000 US troops in the country, they still haven’t been able to get a handle on the situation.
This evening, Bill and I watched the highlights of the interview that ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos conducted with Bush somewhere in, I believe Georgia or Florida, earlier today. Bush was more than usually flustered and inarticulate, and really seemed badly taken aback by the direct and simple questions that GS asked him– about Iraq, especially.
As the account on the ABC News website there says,

    Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
    “He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

Yes, indeed. If I were a Republican Party operative I would not find that reassuring.

More Fateh leadership woes

Danny Rubinstein of HaAretz has an interesting article in Thursday’s paper, in which he writes that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is facing a tough new challenge from other veteran leaders in (primarily) the exile wing of Fateh.
These internal insurgents are reportedly– and not surprisingly– being led by long-time Fateh/PLO veteran Farouq Qaddumi (Abul-Lutf), who lives mainly in Damascus.
Rubinstein writes that the big Fateh bosses had been preparing for a meeting of their movement’s 15-person Central Committee, due to be held this week in Amman. But,

    Abbas did not get the support he expected from his colleagues on the committee. The situation was so bad that the gathering was canceled – though officially, it was merely postponed for a week…
    Thus Abbas now finds himself embroiled in infighting and tension not only with Hamas, but also inside his own movement. And those who are supposed to back him up – the United States, the Quartet, the Arab states and Israel – consider him to be a weak leader who makes a lot of mistakes.
    Under any other circumstances, Abbas would have resigned his post. But now, his aides maintain, this possibility does not exist, since it would mean relinquishing all power in the Palestinian Authority to Hamas. His associates say that as a leader with a sense of national responsibility, he cannot quit…
    This is about a lot more than protocol. It is about a bitter struggle for power: Kaddoumi and two other members of the central committee, Ahmed Ghnayem and Mohammad Jihad, are veteran opponents of the peace process and the Oslo Accords, and refuse to come to the territories.
    Abbas had asked Kaddoumi and his two colleagues to return, at least to the Gaza Strip, which Israel evacuated. However, they have refused, arguing that the Israeli occupation of Gaza is still not over.
    Moreover, Abbas was informed that Kaddoumi had visited Damascus and met there with Meshal about how to include Hamas in the PLO and what positions Hamas leaders would receive in the Palestinian national leadership.
    Both Kaddoumi and Meshal believe that the Palestinian leadership should not be based in the territories, since there, it is at Israel’s mercy. Abbas and his supporters maintain that the leadership in the territories enjoys more freedom of action than has been granted to Palestinian politicians by the Syrian regime in Damascus.
    One serious problem for Abbas is that veteran members of the Fatah Central Committee do not fully support him. Some clashed with him during the period when there was friction between him and Arafat; others have personal gripes against him.
    In an effort to counter this problem, Abbas developed ties with younger members, such as Mohammad Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, and he is pressing to add 21 younger members to the central committee, whose 15 current members are in their seventies and refuse to allow any changes.
    This mess is having a negative effect on Abbas’ ability to deal with both the Hamas government in Gaza and the Hamas leadership in Damascus. Despite backing from Jordan and Egypt, Abbas has been unable to convince Hamas even to accept the Arab peace initiative, which calls for recognition of Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines. The question now is whether Abbas has the strength to announce the dissolution of the Hamas government, thereby risking the possibility of civil war.

Ah, Abul-Lutf. A very vain and silly man. But certainly, someone who by the end of the of the 1990s was able to capture the zeitgeist of that large portion of Fateh supporters forced to live for many decades now in exile outside the homeland– people who had been warily prepared to give the “Oslo” process a chance to succeed but to whom Oslo never offered anything. Period.
It strikes me that Abu Mazen was simply showing his political naviety yet again if he put any hope into the chance that the exile wing of Fateh might back him up in his present power struggle against Hamas. Aleksandr Kerensky, anyone?

Not at Gitmo (yet)

I was supposed to be in Guantanamo today. Actually, the beginning of the story was that I was supposed to be there last Wednesday, October 11. As I’d noted here back on September 29, Mr. Cully Stimson, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, had invited me on a Pentagon-organized tour of the detention camp there, and I had agreed to go…
The October 11 trip got postponed a week agobecause of his office’s difficulties getting hold of a Pentagon Gulfstream in which to take the group. I reorganized my schedule. This Monday, his people called to say they couldn’t get hold of the Gulfstream this Wednesday, either. I called him yesterday to see what was going on. He explained that, since it is congressional recess time, members of the US Congress have been going on a lot of trips using the Pentagon’s executive jets, so our group had once again been bumped. I will be busy for the next couple of Wednesdays– I’m going to Amman for the UNU seminar on “Nonviolence”. So we left it that if there’s a trip on Novermber 8, then he will try to get me on it.
So I’d been doing all this research about Guantanamo, as my preparation for going there! I’ve read not only Joseph Margulies’s book, but also the very informative books by (freed British detainee) Moazzam Begg, Erik Saar, and David Rose. Still to read: Steven Miles’s “Oath Betrayed” and James Yee’s “For God and Country.”
I’ve done a bunch of research on the web. In case you want to do some, too, I’m happy to share with you the portal to around 40 web documents, nearly all of them very interesting, that I created with “del.icio.us” last week.
But the most interesting and inspiring thing I did was to interview a number of the US-based lawyers who have been giving up significant amounts of their time and resources to work pro-bono on Guantanamo-related cases. For example, when I was in DC a couple of weeks ago I interviewed Muneer Ahmad, who’s an Assistant Professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. He’s one of two attorneys representing Omar Khadr, a young Canadian man whose militantly fundamentalist Muslim parents raised him to follow exactly in their footsteps…
In July 2002, Khadr was 15 years old and fighting with an Al-Qaeda unit in southeastern Afghanistan when he was injured severely in a fierce battle against US Special Forces, and was taken prisoner by them. An American medic reportedly saved Khadr’s life on the battelfield. The Special Forces then took him to Bagram “with a bullet-split chest and serious shrapnel wounds to the head and eye.”
Jeff Tietz of Rolling Stone wrote recently, that after Khadr arrived in Bagram,

Continue reading “Not at Gitmo (yet)”

The new global Star Chamber?

Yesterday, President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It was a defining moment, marking the first time that a duly enacted statute in this country has stripped the essential, age-old provisions of habeas corpus away from a whole class of people held prisoner by the US government.
Habeas protections have been suspended here twice before. But on both those occasions, the suspension was done only by executive order– by President Lincoln during the Civil War of the 19th century and by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War 2; and on both those previous occasions, the suspension was lifted with the end of hostilities. By contrast, the present stripping of habeas from a whole class of persons has been written into US law and has no predictable termination point. Some critics have claimed that this makes the new Military Commissions something like the infamous Star Chamber of Britain during the 15th-17th centuries. However, at least the Star Chamber coexisted with habeas, which had been enshrined in British common law since the 13th century, or perhaps earlier.
So maybe the new Military Commissions are even worse than the Star Chamber?
The persons from whom the MCA has stripped habeas protection are those determined by a body formed by the US military that is called a “Combatant Status Review Tribunal” to fall into a category called “unlawful enemy combatants”. The CSRT process had been devised as a way for the US military to claim that it minimally met the requirements of Article 5 of the 3rd Geneva Convention, the convention concerning treatment of prisoners of wa. (Protections for POWs are significantly different from– and superior to– those afforded to common criminals.) Article 5 states that if any doubt should arise as to whether a detained person is a POW or not, “such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
In July 2004, after the Supreme Court ruled that British citizen Shafiq Rasul and a number of other men held prisoner in Guantanamo did indeed have the right to an Article 5 hearing, the administration established the CSRTs for the Guantanamo prisoners. The nearly 700 prisoners then held at Gitmo then had hearings before these (notably unfair) bodies, which judged that the vast majority of them were not POWs but were “unlawful enemy combatants”. (I’ve relied for a lot of the info in this post on Joseph Margulies’s excellent book Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power. It is a great guide through the Kafka-esque maze of regulations that have affected the Gitmo detainees.)
Note that the Gitmo detainees have all along been consigned to a limbo-like universe that “falls between the cracks” of normal and predictable legal regimes. They were brought to Gitmo– most of them between December 2001 and fall 2004, though 14 of them just this past September– precisely because the Bush administration judged that the Guantanamo Naval Base was neither US sovereign territory nor territory that was under US military occupation as per international law. If the former were true, then the detainees would have all the protections that US law affords– as happened, for example, to Ramzi Yousef, who was snatched by the Clinton administration from, I believe, someplace in Pakistan, and brought to New York where he was put on trial. And if the latter were true, then the US military could only capture and hold prisoners in line with the strictures of Geneva Conventions numbers 3 and 4. And indeed, regarding all US military operations inside Iraq, the administration does say it considers itself subject to these Geneva Conventions. Hence the anomaly that Saddam Hussein has been treated considerably better in every way, including in his access to legal counsel and other legal protections, than the 700 or so people who have spent many years at Guantanamo and have never had any credible evidence brought against them.
However, in its judgment on Rasul, the Supreme Court said that at least the detainees deserved a “POW status review” hearing, as per Article 5. And at that point, the administration created (or resurrected) this “unlawful enemy combatant” designation which put the detainees into the Kafka-esque situation that they were neither POWs, and subject to protections as such, nor civilians, and subject to that set of protections.
More legal limbo.
POWs have to be lodged in decent conditions in a group setting; they are not required to submit to any interrogations or to provide any information beyond “name, rank, and serial number”; and they are all assured release and repatriation to their home country at the end of the war– except for those among them regarding whom the detaining authority has specific information that they have committed war crimes, in which case those individuals can be tried. Civilian prisoners, on the other hand, get access “with due speed” to the normal US courts and the protections afforded therein.
The CSRTs’ designation of most Gitmo detainees as “unlawful enemy combatants” denied the detainees both these avenues for potential relief. And given that many Bush administration spokesmen have talked a lot about the “generation-long” extent of the “Global War on Terror”, the detainees have faced the prospect that they might remain in their present legal limbo– and subject, I should add, to conditions of life that are often extremely appalling, including prolonged isolation, very tight controls, very intrusive and unpredictable “interrogations”, etc etc– for the rest of their lives.
This, while the vast majority of the detainees have never been credibly charged (let alone convicted) in any public forum with any specific crime. Indeed, ever since the administration first tried, back in 2002, to set up “Military Commissions” (i.e., military courts) inside Guantanamo to try prisoners there, it has only ever brought any specific charges of wrongdoing against ten of the hundreds of people detained there. Meanwhile, over the years since 2004, it has quietly released around 300 of the men whom it once held there, giving the lie to the hype voiced by Donald Rumsfeld and others at the time the Guantanamo camp was opened, that the people transported there were all “the worst of the worst.”
Shafiq Rasul and many others of those released over the past couple of years have credibly claimed they were unconnected to any violent activities or organizations when they were in Afghanistan or neighboring areas of Pakistan in late 2001, and that they had been captured there by bounty hunters eager to cash in on the $5,000 bounties offered by US agents for any “foreigners” discovered in those regions and turned over to them.
After the Supreme Court’s mid-2004 decision in Rasul, Margulies and other lawyers continued to challenge the denial of habeas rights to detainees, focusing on the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen who was one of those arraigned before a Military Commission. In July 2004, Hamdan specifically filed a petition with the US courts for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that he was being held in Guantanamo without due process. His case wound its way up through the courts and was heard by the Supreme Court during its 2005-2006 term. In a decision issued June 29, 2006, the Supremes judged by a majority of 5-3 (with the Chief Justice, John Roberts, having recused himself) that the Military Commissions as then established at Guantanamo “violate both the [U.S.] Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Steven Breyer (joined by three other justices) noted that,

    Congress has denied the President the legislative authority to create military commissions of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the President from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary…

It was that invitation, to seek specific legislation from Congress for the establishment of Military Commissions, that the Bush administration then proceeded to take up, with gusto. As we know, they won the legislation last month, and yesterday it went into law. The timing of all this has been notable. We are of course in the midst of the kind of election campaign in which charges that legislators are “soft on terrorism” could be expected to be particularly potent. Also, in early September, as I’d noted here, the Bushites “strengthened” the pool of potential military commission defendants at Guantanamo by adding to it the 14 “high value detainees” who had previously been held in a series of “black sites” around the world. (That group included Khaled Sheikh Muhammad and others.)
The excellent and well-linked Jurist/ Paper Chase blog had a good post on the MCA yesterday. It notes that a legal challenge to the new law has already been filed— on behalf of a group of 25 detainees held at the US-run detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan. That latter link, from the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which has filed this petition, tells us that:

    There are an estimated 500 men detained in U.S. custody at Bagram. Though some have been held for years, none of these men has ever received a hearing of any sort. Bagram has been the site of notorious examples of abuse – including abuses that led to the December 2002 deaths of two Afghan detainees.

I guess we all need to become much more aware that the situation of the people held in Bagram and other US-run detention camps in Afghanistan might be just as bad as the situation of those held in the better-known camp in Guantanamo. The MCA covers them as well— indeed, it covers anybody at all, anywhere around the world, whom the President or the Secretary of Defense chooses to put into the category of “unlawful enemy combatant.”
Of course, if we were talking about a person physically located in a national jurisdiction that would challenge the US administration’s claim to jurisdiction of this nature, then Washington probably would not press the issue. But the US-installed and highly US-dependent government of Afghanistan? Don’t hold your breath…
More on all this legal business to follow…

Saddam re-enters Iraqi politics

He’s back. Iraq’s currently imprisoned former president has dictated an open letter through his chief lawyer in which he assures the Iraqi people that “victory is at hand” and calls for their magnanimity towards each other despite recent internecine political differences.
He called on Iraqi Sunnis forgive even those informants who helped the US to track down and kill his two sons, in 2003.
Meanwhile, officials in the “Iraqi” (actually US-dominated) Special Tribunal that has been trying Saddam on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity say that the judges there might deliver the first set of verdicts– on charges related to the killing of 148 Shiites in Dujail in 1982– on November 5.
It is quite possible that, as prosecutors have requested, Saddam might receive a death sentence in that trial. One unresolved question is whether the court will stay “execution” of that sentence long enough to allow completion of the second trial to which he and a group of associates are being subjected– the one involving charges of genocide for his part in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1989.
I would guess that Saddam may have decided to issue his “open letter” now because he fears being silenced fairly soon– either by the imposition of the death penalty, or by imposition of strict restraints on his ability to communicate with his lawyer.
By the way, I’ve just been going through some of my old posts– both here on JWN and on Transitional Justice Forum– on the Saddam trial. Here are some of the more informative ones:

It is true that, as noted in several of the posts above, there have been many procedural problems with the trial of Saddam Hussein– starting, as Nehal Bhuta noted in a comment on that December 2003 post of mine, with the illegal arrogation by the US occupying power of the “right” to control the whole trial process. But still, this man who is responsible for having launched two brutal wars of external aggression and is credibly accused of having committed genocide and crimes against humanity at home has nonetheless been afforded some form of a semi-open trial process and the dignity of enjoying minimally acceptable conditions of confinement… Whereas right now, in Guantanamo, there languish hundreds of prisoners taken from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world by the US, who have been held in quite inhumane conditions– some of them for nearly five years now– and have not had the benefit of anything like a credible trial…
You could say, “that’s life”? No, I think you should say that is how politics and the untrameled exercise of power by the strong over the weak always tend to work…

Uri Avnery’s “The Great Experiment”

Uri Avnery, the Grand Old Man of the Israeli peace movement, wrote a classic essay recently, which I accessed through the “Occupation Magazine” link. (Y’all can always check out Occupation Magazine on the right sidebar here.) It’s titled The Great Experiment. And what, you may ask is that?
Let him explain:

    IS IT possible to force a whole people to submit to foreign occupation by starving it?
    That is, certainly, an interesting question. So interesting, indeed, that the governments of Israel and the United States, in close cooperation with Europe, are now engaged in a rigorous scientific experiment in order to obtain a definitive answer.
    The laboratory for the experiment is the Gaza Strip, and the guinea pigs are the million and a quarter Palestinians living there…

So, how’s it been going? Here is his conclusion:

    How can a population that is hit by hunger, lacking medicaments and equipment for its primitive hospitals and exposed to attacks on land, from sea and from the air, hold out? Will it break? Will it go down on its knees and beg for mercy? Or will it find inhuman strength and stand the test?
    In short: What and how much is needed to get a population to surrender?
    All the scientists taking part in the experiment – Ehud Olmert and Condoleezza Rice, Amir Peretz and Angela Merkel, Dan Halutz and George Bush, not to mention Nobel Peace Price laureate Shimon Peres – are bent over the microscopes and waiting for an answer, which undoubtedly will be an important contribution to political science.
    I hope the Nobel Committee is watching.

A Palestinian villa in West Jerusalem

When I was in Israel back in March, I noted here that the Weekend Haaretz had had an interesting little article about some of the fine, originally Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem.
Recently, I heard from George Bisharat, who teaches at the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. He told me it was his grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, who had built and owned one of those homes– indeed, the one that some time after Israel’s takeover of W. Jerusalem in 1948 became the home of PM Golda “there are no such people as Palestinians” Meir.
George wrote me that some years ago he had published an article about the home, and he gave me permission to republish it here. But before I introduce that text, I want to catch up with the portion of that JWN post in March where I’d noted that in and after the 1948 fighting there was almost complete ethnic cleansing of both halves of Jerusalem– what became the Israeli-controlled Western half and what became (at that point) the Jordanian-controlled Eastern half… In March, I did not have to hand the numbers of people thus “cleansed”. Now I do. According to Michael Dumper’s 1997 book The Politics of Jerisalem since 1967 (Colubia U.P.), approximately 60,000 Palestinian residents fled or were expelled from West Jerusalem and the surrounding villages that year, while around 2,000 Jewish residents fled or were expelled from East Jerusalem.(Dumper, p.65)
After Israel conquered East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, it not only regained control of the properties from which Jews had left in 1948, but also seized considerable additional properties into which it started implanting large numbers of settlers– quite illegally. Those settlers now number more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem, a number that is seldom counted at all in the US media which tend to focus solely on the 230,000-plus settlers implanted into areas of the West Bank that are not in the (unilaterally expanded) boundaries of East Jerusalem.
And were descendants of the 60,000 Palestinians who left West Jerusalem in 1948 given any reciprocal right to return to the homes they had fled there? Ha-ha-ha. Reciprocity? You gotta be kidding!
Anyway, withour further ado, back to Geroge’s piece:
RITE OF RETURN TO A PALESTINIAN HOME
by George Bisharat, 2004
On May 15, the 56th anniversary of the Palestinian “Nakba” (Catastrophe), when one people gained a homeland and another lost theirs, I was thinking of a home in Jerusalem.
It was the residence occupied by Golda Meir — author of the famous quip that “the Palestinian people did not exist” — when she was Israel’s foreign minister. It was also the family home built in 1926 by my grandfather, Hanna Ibrahim Bisharat, “Papa” to all of us.
I went to visit our home for the first time in 1977. Although he was a Christian, Papa named the home “Villa Harun ar-Rashid,” in honor of the Muslim Abbasid Caliph renowned for his eloquence, passion for learning, and generosity. Painted tiles with this name were inset above the second floor balcony and over a side entrance.
EXPLOITS IN THE ORCHARD
When Papa first built the home in what became known as the Talbiyya quarter of Jerusalem, few other residences existed nearby. As I grew up, my father regaled me with tales of his boyhood exploits in the surrounding fields and orchards. Two of my uncles were born while the family lived there; one uncle succumbed to pneumonia in Villa Harun ar-Rashid. The young boys went to school up the road at the Catholic-run Terra Sancta College. My uncle Emile told me of a wager he made with his younger brother, George (for whom I am named), that he could not stand on a swing on the front porch and swing with no hands – – with predictable, but fortunately mild, consequences…

Continue reading “A Palestinian villa in West Jerusalem”