“Modern” means of coercion at Gitmo

I’ve been continuing my pre-Gitmo research. Thanks to all who have sent in suggestions for directions I can go with that. I just discovered tonight that I should be able to get some relevant books out of a nearby library, which is good.
Today, the WaPo had an excellent op-ed by Joseph Margulies, a law prof at Northwestern who was the lead counsel in Rasul, a key habeas-related case at Guantanamo. In the piece, Margulies recalls how, back during the Korean War, the North Koreans succeeded in getting 36 US airmen to falsely confess to a plot to bomb civilian targets…
How did they do this? Margulies writes:

    The senior officer among them was Col. Frank Schwable, the highest-ranking Marine captured in the conflict. “I want to emphasize,” Schwable said later, “that I did not undergo physical torture. Perhaps I would have been more fortunate if I had, because people nowadays seem to understand that better. Mine was the more subtle kind of torment.”
    The airmen were subjected to something new: touchless torture. They were kept isolated from all human contact, apart from their interrogators. One prisoner spent 10 months in solitary confinement, another 13. Schwable did not learn of the armistice until after he confessed.
    They were made to stand or sit in awkward and painful positions for hours at a time. One prisoner had to sit at attention on the edge of a stool for 15 hours per day for 33 days. Another time he had to stand for 30 consecutive hours, until he collapsed. Schwable was required to sit at attention every day for almost 10 weeks.
    They were demeaned, taunted and treated like animals. Schwable said the guards “growled” or “barked” at him, slopped food at him, and made him defecate in public. “Every effort was made to degrade and humiliate me,” he said.
    And of course they were interrogated. Grueling interrogations that lasted hours and hours, repeating the same material they had gone over the day before, and the day before that, until the past became a confusing whirl of fact and fantasy suggested to them by their relentless interlocutors. At last, exhausted and demoralized, their resistance overcome, they confessed. They all confessed in the end. And they all lied…

Compare this with this account, which comes from a recent article by Jeff Tietz in Rolling Stone in which Tietz describes at some length the treatment received by Omar Khadr, a young Arab-Canadian who was just 15 when he was captured by US forces after taking part in a firefight in Afghanistan:

    Before boarding a C-130 transport to Guantanamo, Omar was dressed in an orange jumpsuit and hog-chained: shackled hand and foot, a waist chain cinching his hands to his stomach, another chain connecting the shackles on his hands to those on his feet. At both wrist and ankle, the shackles bit…
    Just before he got on the plane, Omar was forced into sensory-deprivation gear that the military uses to disorient prisoners prior to interrogation. The guards pulled black thermal mittens onto Omar’s hands and taped them hard at the wrists. They pulled opaque goggles over his eyes and placed soundproof earphones over his ears. They put a deodorizing mask over his mouth and nose. They bolted him, fully trussed, to a backless bench. Whichever limbs hadn’t already lost sensation from the cuffs lost sensation from the high-altitude cold during the flight, which took fifteen hours…
    At Guantanamo, Omar was led, his senses still blocked, onto a bus that took the prisoners to a ferry dock. Some of the buses didn’t have seats, and the prisoners usually sat cross-legged on the floor. Guards often lifted the prisoners’ earphones, told them not to move, and when they moved — helplessly, with the motion of the bus, like bowling pins — started kicking them. The repeated blows often left detainees unable to walk for weeks…
    A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. “Get up,” the guard said. “You have a reservation.” “Reservation” is the commonly used term at Gitmo for interrogation.
    In the interrogation room, Omar’s interviewer grew displeased with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Omar tightly to an eye bolt in the center of the floor. Omar’s hands and feet were shackled together; the eye bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left alone for half an hour.
    Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar’s arms, pulled them behind his back and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this particular “stress position” can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.
    An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his chains and pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they’d successfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days…

How come these accounts sound so gruesomely similar? A good part of the answer is given us in Margulies’s article. He recalls how, after the 36 downed US airmen were finally returned home and started talking about their treatment in North Korea,

    One institution, however, was not repelled but intrigued. The experience led the CIA to accelerate its research into the theory and science of coercive interrogation.
    Between 1950 and 1962, the CIA poured millions of dollars into studies that tested different interrogation techniques, hoping to learn from and refine the lessons of Korea. The research culminated in the top-secret KUBARK manual, a 1963 primer on how to conduct coercive counterintelligence interrogations. The manual was finally disclosed in 1997 and is now available online.

That would be here. Or here.
(KUBARK, according to the National Security Archive web-page at that first link, is the CIA’s cryptonym for itself. Go figure.)
Anyway, at some later point, the basic principles in KUBARK turned up again, in the “SERE” program that the army Special Forces etc started to use. One interesting aspect of the SERE program was that it was purportedly a defensive program– i.e., it was to train these people to be able to resist various forms of coercive interrogation if they were ever captured. But in a period in which many human-rights organizations had mounted large and fairly successful campaigns against the KUBARK program– especially, in the various forms in which it was taught to repressive Latin American militaries at the School of the Americas and elsewhere– having the SERE program out there kept alive a lot of so-called specialized “know-how” in the US military about coercive interrogations. (This is parallel to what goes in in the field of, for example, bioweapons… where everyone who’s doing the research for it claims very loudly that “It’s only for defensive purposes!” — but guess what, they still end up with all those handy toxins on the shelf in case they need them.)
Anyway, despite the plethora of footnotes at the bottom of that KUBARK manual, the whole business is not so terribly arcane, “modern”, and special as you might think. In fact, it includes many techniques of coercion known throughout history, including many used by the various European colonial powers around the world throughout the past 400 years.
Back in 1992, I organized a conference of Middle Eastern human rights activists in Spain at which the main focus was on trying to build a trans-national network against torture. We had a small number of people from other regions there, too, including a great psychiatrist from the Copenhagen-based International Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims. He quoted the organization’s founder, Dr. Inge Genefke, who has famously said:

    “The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder… Today we know that survivors of torture can be helped to regain their health and strength, and in helping them we take the weapon from their torturers. They sought the destruction of other human beings. We have proved that they have not succeeded.”

Genefke’s colleague who came to our conference went a bit further than that, too. He said that the aim of the torturer is to destroy the victim as an independent personality, and that it is the independent personality that is the basic building block of democracy. Quite true.

Powell held captive for four years?

‘Tis the season for “big” political books in Washington DC. The WaPo’s Karen DeYoung has a new one just about to come out on Colin Powell– just at the same time that Bob Woodward’s book about the whole Bush administration will be hitting the bookstores. Today, he got a first chunk of his excerpted in the main section of the paper. As for DeYoung, she had a longish excerpt from her book, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell, in the paper’s color-mag section today.
Her book won’t be coming out till October 10. It is based on a number of interviews with Powell– and probably even more from members of his entourage like Rich Armitage and Larry Wilkerson.
To me, the biggest revelation in DeYoung’s excerpt today is this: Colin Powell was held captive by heinous forces in his office in the State Department for the entire four years he was Secretary of State.
Who knew?
… Well, that, at least, is the only way I can interpret this little portion of DeYoung’s prose, where she was discussing the humiliating circumstances in which Bush brought Powell’s tenure as SecState to an end in Nov 2004: “After four long years, Powell had anticipated the end of his service and sometimes even longed for it.”
So, um, if he had– not just once, but “sometimes”– “longed” for the end of his service, then why on earth did he stay? I mean, being Secretary of State is not like being in the military, where you have to sign a termed contract that has some extremely tough constraining clauses. At least, I always used to think that a SecState was quite free to leave her/his post any time. (Especially if he or she “longs” to do so, wouldn’t you think?)
But now, I am learning that there must have been some heinous force tying Powell to his desk there. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser…
Pat Lang, however, has another explanation for what was going on with Powell. He calls it the “Great Man Syndrome”, that is, the delusion a person might have that he is “great” and even indispensable.
Here’s what else he writes about Powell there:

    Here is the case of a wise and great man (perhaps “dimly wise and rudely great” but, nevertheless..) who, I think, could have been president of the United States and who, with seemingly unwavering determination threw himself under the wheels of a bus. (rhetorical flourish)
    Powell knew that “W” was out if his depth as president. He had to know that. He must have known that the “Vulcans” were successfully tutoring his boss on the subject of “the world.” Powell certainly knew that the imagined connections of [Al-Qaeda] to the Iraqi government were false. He clearly doubted the whole tissue of falsehood surrounding the WMD “pitch.” (Wolfie’s description)
    If I am correct about this, than why on earth did he go up to New York to the UN to smear shit all over the memory of his service? Why?
    The answer given to me by my bag of analytic tools is that he just could not remove himself from the action. He was a victim of GMS…

For me, there was an uncanny, almost a full-circle feeling in reading DeYoung’s piece. Powell’s hapless February 2003 presentation to the UN was the subject of my first two posts here on JWN (1 and 2). In the second of those, I noted the parallels between the flimsy public “justifications” Powell and his cronies were amassing for the increasingly imminent attack on Iraq and the extremely flimsy “justifications” Shimon Peres had provided for his 1996 assault against Lebanon.
The really frustrating thing is that none of these gung-ho militarists ever seems to learn anything from his mistakes or those of his close allies. I mean, Colin Powell, for goodness’ sakes!! He was the guy who quintessentially had “learned” the lessons of Vietnam, had worked hard to reconstruct the US army after that debacle, wrote very movingly in his memoir about the terrible costs of Vietnam… But there he was in February 2003– not in a uniform, but still, in a very real sense, playing a dealbreaker role there in the administration.
I mean, if he had come out in public back on February 6, 2003, and had said, “Mr. President, all this so-called ‘intel’ you’ve stove-piped to me about Iraqi links with Al- Qaeda or Iraqi WMDs is a crock of s**t,” then he could have stopped this war in its tracks. His credibility– then– was just so, so much greater than the President’s.
Heck, he didn’t even have to come out in public and say anything. All he needed to do, back at that time, was resign.
But he didn’t.
And the world got what the world got in the way of war, devastation, fitna, and destruction. Most of it, quite unforgivably, in Iraq, but some here in the US, too.
Just because of Colin Powell’s attachment to his position.
I am beyond words.

Ending the occupation rule of Palestine and Golan

After 42 months of US occupation rule in Iraq, have we in the US finally learned a few truth about the true nature of rule by military occupation?
First and foremost, this: Rule by a foreign military occupation force– like any form of military rule– is inherently anti-democratic.
As we learn this fact, can we finally start to convince our fellow-citizens here in the US that Israel’s exercise of military occupation rule over some millions of its neighbors is a situation that has to be brought to a very speedy end?
And can we accept that our government here in the US, including successive administrations from both parties and the vast majority of members of Congress from both parties, has actually enabled and colluded in perpetuating this inherently oppressive, anti-democratic situation… which has been proceeding now for nearly 40 years? And therefore, that we as US citizens have a special responsibility to end the extremely generous financial and above all political support from our government, that has enabled this highly discriminatory form of rule to continue…
This includes bringing to a definitive end Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, its occupation of the rest of the West Bank, its continued occupation-at-some-distance of Gaza, and its continued occupation of Golan. Golan is part of the sovereign territory of Syria (and Israel’s ‘annexation’ of it in 1981 has no standing whatsoever in international law.) The West Bank and Gaza are territories that the UN unequivocally allocated in 1947 to a fully sovereign Palestinian Arab state, though this state has never been allowed to be born. And Palestinian East Jerusalem– like Israeli West Jerusalem– is territory that the UN had allocated to a special “corpus separatum”. Whether that latter idea is now revived or not, still, Israel has no claim to ownership of East Jeruslaem except by virtue of its conquest of the area in 1967– and the UN has repeatedly, and quite rightly, underscored the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
Running a prolonged military occupation over another nation’s people is, self-evidently, very harmful to the wellbeing, and often even to the lives and physical security, of the people thus occupied. But it is also– as many Israelis and Americans can now attest– extremely harmful to the moral and spiritual quality of the community doing the occupying. In fact, it is harmful all round– except for the small number of entrepreneurs and shysters who in any such situation arise to make money off it. (I’m thinking of shareholders in companies like Halliburton, the private security companies that have proliferated in both Iraq and the Israeli-occupied territories, the real-estate and construction companies that have been making a huge killing by exploiting, basically, looted lands and resources in Palestine and Golan, etc etc…)
Because occupation is so harmful, and so deeply anti-democratic, I think we should work just as hard to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and Syrian lands as we do to end the US occupation of Iraq.
Imagine living under military rule for nearly 40 years!
Anyway, I’ve put a couple of new resources up on the front-page sidebar here on JWN, to help people understand more about Israel’s occupation rule over E. Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan. One is the link to “Occupation magazine” that’s just below the second of my occupation “day-counters” there. I have to say that site is not perfectly organized. But it certainly has a large amount of (mainly, Israeli-sourced) material.
The other resource, a bit further down on the sidebar, is the link to the five-part series I wrote about “The human dimension of the Golan issue” in 1998, based on a quick reporting trip I made there in March that year. It’s a bit dated, obviously. But still, not many people write about the human dimension there, viewing Golan only as a chunk of strategic geography instead of as a beloved homeplace to its indigenous people– both those who still live there, and those who fled in 1967. (This piece, by Gideon Levy in today’s HaAretz, is also about Golan.)
.. And if we want any more “proof” about the parallellism of the two occupation forces, just look at all the efforts they have both made to stoke extremely harmful “divide-and-rule” actions among their subject peoples. As if things weren’t bad enough already for the people of Gaza and of Baghdad without having all these added layers of fear, divisionism, and suffering heaped onto them… God save them all.

Why are we in Iraq? (DeWine quotable)

NBC’s Meet the (de)Press(ed) today included conservative host Tim Russert interviewing the two candidates for a US Senate Seat in Ohio – a slot until recently thought to be an easy repeat for current Republican Senator Mike DeWine. The interview sections on foreign policy were awful – in terms of substance – with DeWine and challenger Democrat Congressman Sherrod Brown constantly berating each other with half-sentence short hand barbs and sounding frankly like little brats throwing sand at each other: “I can’t believe you said that; no I didn’t; yes you did; no, you’re wrong; yada, yada, yada.”
I miss the days when Meet the Press would have one political figure or expert guest interviewed by multiple, different journalists and the whole affair was conducted respectfully in civil tones. Alas, call it the CNN “cross-fire effect,” where the TV “news” media feeds us more vapid cock-fights than substance.
I woke up from my disgust with the MTP format when Russert asked about the growing majority Iraqi sentiment in favor of prompt US military withdrawal from Iraq. Read carefully Senator DeWine’s reply: (this is from the NBC transcript)

MR. RUSSERT: Here’s two poll questions that I think caught the attention of a lot of Americans. Let me start with Senator DeWine.
“Most Iraqis Favor Immediate U.S. Pullout.” “Most Iraqis.” “A strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers.”
And then this poll. “Iraqis back attacks on U.S. troops. About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces … [according to] the poll done for University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes.”
Senator DeWine, if they want us out, and they’re in favor of attacking us, why are we still there?

SEN. DeWINE: Tim, I was shocked by that as well. But you know, on reflection, this is their country. There’s a lot of things going wrong. You blame someone who is there. Still does not change that we’re not in Iraq primarily for the Iraqis. We’re in Iraq for us. We’re–have to do what we have to do, and it goes back to what the three generals–three military leaders said. It would be a total disaster for us to leave. It is in our self-interest, the interest to protect American families, that we are in Iraq. That’s why we’re there.

Come again? Its “their country” – but, if they don’t want us there, then oh never mind, “we’re not in Iraq primarily for the Iraqis. We’re in Iraq for us.”
Let’s see now, whatever happened to promoting democracy? Was that just for us?

Continue reading “Why are we in Iraq? (DeWine quotable)”

Woodward on Kissinger’s role

Maybe I’ve been engaging in unsuspected age-ism all along? I just kind of assumed that everyone else regarded 83-year-old Henry Kissinger, as I did, as an out-of-it, barely articulate old guy whose days of exercizing any real power or influence were long behind him.
So Bob Woodward is now here, in the first exceprt of his new book to be carried by the WaPo (Sunday), telling me that I under-estimated Kissinger’s role completely:

    A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
    “Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”
    The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
    Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
    In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
    In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Kissinger wrote, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”
    He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
    Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
    He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
    Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn’t have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That’s why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
    In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
    “The president can’t be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece,” Kissinger said. “You may want to reduce troops,” but troop reduction should not be the objective. “This is not where you put the emphasis.”
    To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
    “Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded,” he wrote.
    The policy of “Vietnamization,” turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. “It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”
    Two months after Gerson’s meeting, the administration issued a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.

There is a little bit in this excerpt about the infighting among top Bush advisors that was featured in the NYT stories about the book Friday and Saturday.
The other notable thing in the WaPo excerpt was the account of a meeting this past March between Centcom commander Jean Abizaid and the courageous Rep. John Murtha, who’s been calling openly for a quick withdrawal from Iraq.
Woodward wrote:

    Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
    Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha…
    “The war in Iraq is not going as advertised,” Murtha had said. “It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.”
    Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman’s office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, “We’re that far apart.”

Woodie doesn’t tell us, of course, what Abizaid plans to do about that…
Anyway, those are the best bits so far.

Thuggish Israeli minister calls for killing Nasrallah

It seems to me that assassinating one’s opponents is– like torture– a slippery slope. Maybe the first few times you do it, you’re still a bit hesitant. But do it scores or hundreds of times, and it might become a habit. Heck, you might even start bragging about it in public.
It strikes me that has already happened in Israel. Here, today, we have Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer openly calling for the killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: “We should wait for the right opportunity and not leave him alive.”
I met Ben-Eliezer once, briefly, in the lobby of the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv. He struck me even then as fairly thuggish. He strikes me even more that way now. He is one of the”grand old men” of the Israeli Labor Party, and was Sharon’s Defense Minister in the early years of this decade.
And of course, when he calls for assassinating leaders of neighboring communities, this is not just rhetoric. It may well have an effect on Israeli policy– especially since he has been a close advisor to neophyte Defense Minister Amir Peretz. Also, Israel has already assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas Musawi; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdul-Aziz Rantisi, and many other Hamas political figures– as well as considerably more than 100 suspected organizers of violent acts in Gaza and the West Bank.
(Of course, none of those individuals intentionally assassinated was ever given a “day in court”; no-one has ever been shown the “evidence” that brought about their killing. Also, numerous bystanders have also been killed in these lethal operations.)
How easy it has become for Israeli politicians to now speak openly about intentionally pursuing a policy of killing and destruction!
Here in the United States, the Bush administration has undertaken, certainly, a number of deliberate “targeted killings” (assassinations), along the Israeli model. But there is no open public incitement from powerful members of the government for this. Why, even George Bush says of Osama Bin Laden only that he wants him “Dead or Alive”. (And that is bad enough.) And Saddam Hussein, for all the considerable evidence against him, ended up in a courtroom.
I find it extremely disturbing in general that my tax dollars fund so much violence, escalation, killing, and oppression around the world. But somehow, the idea that a high-level recipient of US aid money can go around openly inciting lethal violence in the way that Ben-Eliezer is doing seems even worse than most things the Israelis do.
Killing anyone is wrong. Period. Where did Ben-Eliezer get the idea that it’s okay to carry on like this? Time, surely, for our leaders here in the US to call a halt to such incitement.

Dialogue between west and Hamas, Hizbullah?

Last Wednesday, I went to a 90-minute panel discussion at the U.S. Institute
of Peace titled “How to handle Hamas and Hezbollah”.  One of the main
reasons I went was because my old friend and colleague Ziad Abu Amr
was listed as on the panel.  In the end, though, he “appeared” only
via a slightly dysfunctional speakerphone.  The other speakers
were Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke from an organization called
Conflicts Forum , and Fred Hof a smart and experienced guy from Armitage Associates– that’s the private
consulting firm founded a whole back by the high-profile former Under Secretary
of State Rich Armitage.

It was too bad Ziad wasn’t there.  I think he was speaking from his
home in Gaza, and it sounded as though he was up to his ears in the very long-drawn-out,
on-again-off-again negotiations between Abu Mazen and the Hamas leaders.
 Basically, he expressed the hope that the Palestinians could find a
way to put together a National Unity Government, and that the international
community would then find a way to deal with it.  One observatiopn he
made was that Hamas’s brush with the exercize of governmental power in the
PA– brief and strictly limited though it has been– has already been enough
to corrupt what he had previously seen as the “internal discipline” of their
decision-making process.  (This may or may not ba a bit of an exaggeration.
 What is clear to me is that the current circumstances of tight siege
make it very hard for Hamas’s far-flung leadership to be able
to conduct rational internal communications. This no doubt hampers their internal decisionamking considerably.)  He also said,
“Hamas’s relationship with Iran might turn out not to be a strategic
one for them.”  He made a strong pitch for the superior effectiveness
of “local” mediators between Hamas and Fateh, over regional and internatinal
ones.

Next up was Mark Perry of Conflicts Forum.  (Perry is an interesting guy: a former
journo and historian, he has published a number of well-received books about
US history.  Back in 1994, he published
A fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace
.)  He noted that CF had been involved in dialogue with Hamas for the
past 2.5 years.  He said that Hamas had indeed played by the rules of
the electoral game over that period– but that then the US government had
imposed the three additional requirements on it.  “The Hamas people
say to me, ‘If we do everything the Americans ask of us upfront, then what
is there left to negotiate with the Israelis about?'” he said. He added that
the Hamas leaders indicate fairly strongly that they would be prepared to
meet the three conditions at the end of of a negotiation, but not at the beginning.
 “The Damascus leadership of Hamas has said this, too, ” he said. (Check
my own reporting on these questions, from my trip to Gaza, the West Bank,
and Israel earlier this year,
here.)

Continue reading “Dialogue between west and Hamas, Hizbullah?”

Woodward and other bad news for the Republicans

Bob Woodward is a once-revered icon of the Washington journalism establishment. Back in the 1970s, he and Carl Bernstein helped to break the story of the involvement of the Nixon White House in the Watergate break-in. Earlier in the G.W. Bush presidency, Woodward had two very laudatory and insider-y books about the Bush administration, which portrayed Bush as a decisive, etc “great strategic thinker” (ha-ha-ha), though they did also reveal some pretty interesting details about how decisions were getting made inside the GWB White House.
Now the tide has turned on the Bush presidency. And if we need any more proof of this, it can lie in the fact that Woodward has been cutting his losses– i.e., saying “to heck with continuing to kiss butt in order to get good access, let’s tell some truth round here!” That, at least, seems to be the big message about his latest book, due out Monday.
However, the NYT’s David Sanger managed to buy an early copy and wrote about it in Friday’s paper, with a follow-up piece in Saturday’s paper.
In addition, Woodward has taped an interview for CBS’s program “60 Minutes”, and some excerpts of that were made available today.
Highlights from what Sanger wrote in today’s NYT:

    The White House ignored an urgent warning in September 2003 from a top Iraq adviser [Robert Blackwill] who said that thousands of additional American troops were desperately needed to quell the insurgency there, according to a new book by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter and author. The book describes a White House riven by dysfunction and division over the war. [Gosh, sounds a lot like Israel today, don’t you think? ~HC]
    … Robert D. Blackwill, then the top Iraq adviser on the National Security Council, is said to have issued his warning about the need for more troops in a lengthy memorandum sent to Ms. Rice. The book says Mr. Blackwill’s memorandum concluded that more ground troops, perhaps as many as 40,000, were desperately needed.
    It says that Mr. Blackwill and L. Paul Bremer III, then the top American official in Iraq, later briefed Ms. Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, about the pressing need for more troops during a secure teleconference from Iraq. It says the White House did nothing in response.
    The book describes a deep fissure between Colin L. Powell, Mr. Bush’s first secretary of state, and Mr. Rumsfeld: When Mr. Powell was eased out after the 2004 elections, he told Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, that “if I go, Don should go,” referring to Mr. Rumsfeld.
    Mr. Card then made a concerted effort to oust Mr. Rumsfeld at the end of 2005, according to the book, but was overruled by President Bush, who feared that it would disrupt the coming Iraqi elections and operations at the Pentagon.
    … Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.
    On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.
    In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.
    The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”
    The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.
    After General Garner finished his PowerPoint presentation — which included his plan to use up to 300,000 troops of the Iraqi Army to help secure postwar Iraq, the book says — there were no questions from anyone in the situation room, and the president gave him a rousing sendoff.

In Saturday’s paper Sanger writes that White House spokesman Tony Snow tried to rebut some of the book’s main findings. But Sanger notes that Snow did not explain,

    why Mr. Bush’s upbeat assessments of a “Plan for Victory” in Iraq, laid out in a series of speeches late last year, contrasted so sharply with the contents of classified memorandums written by officials who warned that failure was also a significant possibility.
    Some of those memorandums were written by Philip D. Zelikow, a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, including one in early 2005 in which Mr. Zelikow characterized Iraq as “a failed state” two years after the invasion, and another in September 2005, in which he said there was a 70 percent chance of success in achieving a stable, democratic state. That meant, Mr. Zelikow said, that there was a 30 percent chance of failure, including what he called a “significant risk” of “catastrophic failure,” meaning a collapse of the state Mr. Bush has tried to create.

In the CBS News interview, Woodward told interviewer Mike Wallace that,

    the president and vice president often meet with Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, as an adviser. [Kissinger???? See here. ~HC] Says Woodward, “Now what’s Kissinger’s advice? In Iraq, he declared very simply, ‘Victory is the only meaningful exit strategy.'” Woodward adds. “This is so fascinating. Kissinger’s fighting the Vietnam War again because, in his view, the problem in Vietnam was we lost our will.”
    President Bush is absolutely certain that he has the U.S. and Iraq on the right course, says Woodward. So certain is the president on this matter, Woodward says, that when Mr. Bush had key Republicans to the White House to discuss Iraq, he told them, “I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney [his dog] are the only ones supporting me.”

That, though, as Woodward also told Wallace,

    insurgent attacks against coalition troops occur, on average, every 15 minutes, a shocking fact the administration has kept secret. “It’s getting to the point now where there are eight-, nine-hundred attacks a week. That’s more than 100 a day. That is four an hour attacking our forces,” says Woodward.
    The situation is getting much worse, says Woodward, despite what the White House and the Pentagon are saying in public. “The truth is that the assessment by intelligence experts is that next year, 2007, is going to get worse and, in public, you have the president and you have the Pentagon [saying], ‘Oh, no, things are going to get better,'”

I am really glad this book is coming out in the run-up to the elections. In conjunction with the still-unfolding news about the involvement of sleazeball lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s many contacts with the White House and today’s abrupt resignation of Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley after revelations that he’d sent some highly improper instant messages to male teenagers working as “pages” in Congress, it’s been a bad news day all round for the Republicans.
(Even sleazier: Foley was chair of something called the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus and had recently introduced legislation to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He was also a deputy whip for the GOP. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.)

So really, who IS going to Gitmo?

I guess I never answered the question in the title of my last post. So the answer is: me, I’m going to Gitmo October 11.
Last week, I was contacted by the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, Mr. Cully Stimson, who said he was organizing two one-day trips to Guantanamo in October, and invited me to make my choice between them. After hearing a little more about the trips, I decided to go. As Mr. Stimson described the trips to me, I’ll be able to see a number of facilities and workspaces around the detention camp(s), and talk to a number of officials there. I asked if I could talk to some detainees, but he said that the delegates from the ICRC are the only outsiders who are allowed to meet with them. I am very sorry about that. But still, I think it’s worth going so I can learn more about the system, the situation, and some of the people there.
I respect Mr. Stimson’s decision to invite me. He made clear when we talked that he had been reading what I’ve been writing about the detention operation, so I guess he knows more or less where I’m coming from. I think it is a strength of people in a democratic culture to be able to reach out and maintain respectful relations and communications with people with whom one might expect to disagree. So the fact that he’d invited me even though he could reasonably expect me to be a tough questioner is another reason I decided to go. I am going to go in a spirit of listening and learning as much as I can. I told him, of course, that I would be writing as much as I could about the whole experience, and he said he expected that.
Of course, I shall be writing as fully about what I am not allowed to see and do at Gitmo as about what I am allowed to see and do.
The preceding post here about the newly legislated ground-rules for the new Military Commissions is very relevant to what is going to be going on in Gitmo in October. I don’t expect that the new Military Commissions will be up and running by October 11, but no doubt some preparations will already have started to be made there for them.
Meantime, I need to learn as much as I can about the whole set-up at Gitmo before I go, so I’ll know what questions to ask when I get there. I have started collecting various resource materials… AP has a done some very solid work on getting basic details about the detainees out into the public domain through FOIA requests, and I found I could access some of this material through this portal (scroll down right sidebar.) I’ve been checking out as much as I can of the sgreat reporting by the Miami Herald‘s Carol Rosenberg and the websites of the big human rights organizations, and I’ve been talking to a few people… If JWN readers have other great ideas how I can prepare for the trip, let me know.

Guess who’s going to Gitmo?

Yesterday, all the Republican Senators except Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and Olympia Snowe of Maine lined up with the Bush administration to pass the “Military Commissions Act of 2006”, which defines the category of “unlawful enemy combatant” and establishes a new class of special courts (commissions) where the UEC’s can be tried. The WaPo’s careful military correspondent Jeffrey Smith explains that,

    the bill empowers the executive branch to detain indefinitely anyone it determines to have “purposefully and materially” supported anti-U.S. hostilities. Only foreign nationals among those detainees can be tried by the military commissions, as they are known, and sentenced to decades in jail or put to death.

This was a sad, sad day for the Republic. (Read the NYT’s excellent editorial on the shortcomings of the legislation, which ran yesterday, here.)
It was a sad day, too, for the Republican Party, three of whose leading senators– Warner, McCain, and L. Graham– had until last week stood out against the administration’s highly election-related attempt to ram this legislation through Congress. This week, only Chafee voted against the bill, while Snowe to her credit at least abstained.
Meanwhile, no fewer than welve Democratic senators crossed the floor to vote with the administration bill. (Names here.)
In his blog on Washingtonpost.com, Dan Froomkin wrote today:

    I’m still amazed that Democrats didn’t filibuster the bill in the Senate. Indeed, 12 Democrats actually voted for it.
    By contrast, Carl Hulse , writing in the New York Times, is amazed at how many Democrats voted against it: “The Democratic vote in the Senate on Thursday against legislation governing the treatment of terrorism suspects showed that party leaders believe that President Bush’s power to wield national security as a political issue is seriously diminished. . . .
    “It was a stark change from four years ago, when Mr. Bush cornered Democrats into another defining pre-election vote on security issues — that one to give the president the authority to launch an attack against Iraq. At the time, many Democrats felt they had little choice politically but to side with Mr. Bush, and a majority of Senate Democrats backed him.”

I guess this is a glass-half-empty vs. glass-half-full type of situation. On balance I guess I’m with Hulse. I think that, though it’s a pity that so many Dems in both houses ended up voting for the bill, at least it is good that (however slowly) some of the party’s pols are finding out that perhaps it’s okay to stand up to the Prez on issues vital to our self-worth and our national security…