Guantanamo detainees sold into bondage?

How many of the roughly 530 detainees in the US detention center in Guantanamo were actuially sold into bondage by bounty-hunters eager to make a fortune from US rewards programs?
Quite possibly, a large proportion of them. AP reporter Michelle Faul has a very shocking piece on the wire today that makes this claim. She’s writing from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she has been following the (far from fair) “military tribunals” staged for many of the Guantanamo detainees to date. She attributes the claim about detainees having been sold into bondage to testimony that detainees gave to the “tribunals”, according to trasncripts of the hearings that AP forced out of the US government through the “Freedom of Information Act”.
In addition, Faul quotes Gary Schroen, a former CIA officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Ladenas saying the detainees’ accounts,

    Faul writes:

      [A] wide variety of detainees at the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged they were sold into capture. Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in the transcripts from the tribunals, which were held to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as enemy combatants.
      One detainee who said he was an Afghan refugee in Pakistan accused the country’s intelligence service of trumping up evidence against him to get bounty money from the U.S.
      “When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn’t pay them, they’d make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I’d definitely go to Cuba,” he told the tribunal. “After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you.”
      Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for “a briefcase full of money” then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo.
      “It’s obvious. They knew Americans were looking for Arabs, so they captured Arabs and sold them

Muhsin Abdul-Hamid’s day in detention

It is, of course, quite possible that the US command in Iraq is so deeply ignorant and dysfunctional that it would send troops to arrest Muhsin Abdul-Hamid– the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party and one of the former rotating “Presidents” of Iraq under the CPA-created IGC– “by mistake”.
It is also entirely possible that this was the best way they could think of to bring him in for some important negotiations… And not a completely stupid way, either. This way, A-H is not tainted in the eyes of his constituency with having “talked” openly with the Americans. (Remember the negotiations the De Klerk regime had with Nelson Mandela, who was in their custody at the time… For a long time the “cover” they all used around those negotiations was that Mandela was discussing merely the improvement of the conditions of the political prisoners, rather than anything political… )
So who knows what was discussed during Abdul-Hamid’s day in detention Monday? If the Americans did make an overture to him to upgrade their political negotiations, then who knows how he responded? One day, we might all find out.

Lebanon’s disappointing elections

Two days after the first round of the Lebanese parliamentary elections, the mood in the country seems pretty disappointed– apathy and alienation from the country’s ultra-arcane electoral process seem to be ruling the day.
In Tuesday’s Daily Star, Hanna Anbar and Michael Glackin write:

    Oh dear. Just four months after Lebanon’s people electrified the world and toppled a government; less than five weeks after the last Syrian soldier left Lebanon, we have finally discovered it wasn’t just an inept government that Lebanese people had to deal with, it was an inept political class.
    For all the justified talk of “Cedar Revolutions” and “People Power” the abysmal turnout in Sunday’s first round of polling underlines the huge chasm that separates the aspirations of the Lebanese people from the painfully limited ambitions of their politicians.
    The run up to the start of Lebanon’s much touted elections revealed its political leaders, Hariri, Jumblatt, Aoun et al had all fallen spectacularly short of the people they purport to represent…

The first round of elections involved just Beirut. Nine of the 19 seats there were uncontested. As you can see from this official report on the contests for the other ten seats there, they weren’t really “contested” in any serious way at all… More like, the voting in each of those mutli-seat constituencies was cooked by the parties in advance, so the difference in votes between those who “won” and those who didn’t win was enormous.
Also, turnout was pathetic. Around 30%. This seems in good part like an indicator of large support for the recently returned General Michel Aoun, who was urging a boycott of elections that, he claimed, had been pre-cooked by all the old pols of the 1990s.
I think there are four rounds of elections altogether, covering all the country. The last round is June 19th. I don’t know the exact schedule of which districts vote when. (Can anyone help with that?)
Anyway, Hizbullah, having done a deal with Amal, reportedly looks set to do well in the elections. All the reports from the previous three rounds of parliamentary elections and the two rounds of municipal elections in which they’ve competed describe the discipline that marked the party’s participation, as well as the savvy political smarts they displayed in “playing” Lebanon’s extremely complex electoral game. (Even while they continue to argue for simple, and much more accountable, one-person-one-vote democracy.)
In previous elections they’ve always had to defer to Syria’s main puppets inside the Shia community, Amal. This time, they can relate to Amal on a much more realistic (that is, stronger) basis.
The elections do seem interesting at some levels, though. For example, the most amazing backroom deals seem to be underway– between Jumblatt and Hizbullah, potentially between Jumblatt and Aoun, etc etc.
So much better than fighting, anyway.

Hizbullah and the May 2000 liberation of South Lebanon

Last Wednesday, May 25, was the fifth anniversary of the intriguing victory that lebanon’s Hizbullah won when all the positions of the Israeli-puppet “South Lebanon Army” strung along the (in-)security zone that Israel maintained inside south Lebanon collapsed within a period of a few short hours.
The collapse of the SLA threw the Israeli forces that were still in the zone into a big tizzy, and as a result the withdrawal the IDF undertook back to their own country was much more hurried and much, much less dignified than they had planned for.
The “bloodbath” that the Israelis had long openly warned might befall the Christians of south Lebanon after an IDFwithdrawal never occurred. Most of those Lebanese– Christians and Shiites– who had worked with the SLA turned themselves in to Hizbullah and the Lebanese army and received two- to three-year sentences for treason in the Lebanese military courts. Some had fled to Israel; but over the months that followed most of them returned to Lebanon.
The most amazing thing about Liberation Day was that it nearly all happened because of a largely unarmed mass demonstration by Hizbullah-organized Lebanese villagers.
Here is an account of that day given in an interview last week by Timur Goksel, the longtime spokesman for (and political advisor to) the UN’s long-running Interim Force in Lebanon, UNIFIL. It appeared in the “Liberation Day supplement” published last week by the Lebanese daily As-Safir. The translation is by a friend.
[Headline:] Events prior to and after the liberation…
Goksel: UN resolution 1559 is unrealistic and nobody knows who will

Conflict termination and “justice”

So, a couple of weeks ago I finished a decent draft of my book about transitional justice mechanisms and the success (or otherwise) of conflict-termination efforts in three countries in southern Africa… And I sent it off to a publisher for consideration, since somewhat foolishly I had failed to do much to “market” the text of the book before that. Oh well, can’t do everything at once. The draft is not bad, imho.
At this point, having done that, and having then intensively brainstormed some of these very same issues with the great bunch of learners from many countries (including many conflict-torn countries) around the world in the class I was teaching at Eastern Mennonite Univ. last week (PAX 668), I just want to write some quick notes here about three books that have come out in recent years on different aspects of my same topic, all of which I consider make very constructive contributions to this woefully under-developed field of knowledge.
I should just also re-stress here one of my own strong starting points in all my own work these days, name that war and conflict themselves inflict major violations on all the human rights of people living in areas directly affected by these conflicts. Contrary to the fantasies of some war apologists who live in secure western countries– including those political liberals who believe that wars can be fought “for humanitarian ends”– there is no such thing as a “clean”, violation-free war whose “success” in winning desirable ends is sufficient to justify the always regrettable “collateral” damage inflicted on civilian populations along the way… War, as I know from my own experience, isn’t like that. It kills people– including, always, many many people who are complete innocents. It also sets in train aftershocks of violence that reverberate quite unpredictably into the years and decades that follow…
Anyway, these books I wanted to write about. They are:

    Rama Mani’s Beyond retribution: Seeking justice in the shadows of war (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, and Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002),
    Roland Paris’s At war’s end: Building peace after civil conflict (Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and
    Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein’s edited volume My neighbor, my enemy: Justice and community in the aftermath of mass atrocity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

All these books are worth a close read. I’ll take them quickly, one at a time:

Continue reading “Conflict termination and “justice””

The withdraw-from-Iraq movement in Congress

The withdraw-from-Iraq movement is slowly gathering strength in the US Congress.
I’ve been away from most news sources for most of the past week, so I don’t know how much publicity has been given to the fact that on Wednesday evening 128 members of the House of Representatives voted for an amendment stating:

    “It is the sense of Congress that the president should

Peace in Darfur?

A glimmer of real hope regarding the situation in Darfur!
I just got an email from those great peacemakers at the Catholic lay organization Sant’ Egidio to say that after a gathering at their homeplace in Rome,

    the representatives of the two movements opposing the government of Sudan, who interrupted the negotiates in December 2004, have committed themselves to return to the negotiations table under the aegis of the African Union, without preliminary conditions. This is a first step towards peace, so much needed by this people that is greatly suffering.
    An agreement was achieved, once again, within the walls of an ancient house of prayer where, every day, the Gospel teaches how to become craftsmen of peace.

I don’t yet see the announcement in the English-language pages on their website. Actually, this “news” is not completely new, but was contained in, for example, this May 13 story from Reuters.
Many people in the human rights community worldwide have become very energized around the campaign to arrest, prosecute, and punish the perpetrators of the worst rights abuses in Darfur. I hope they become equally– or even more– energized around the campaign to find a decent, sustainable, rights-respecting peace for the peoples of Darfur and of all of Sudan.
The more I study the phenomenon of atrocities in our world, the more clear it becomes to me that atrocitious violence on a scale that commands the attention of the whole world is committed primarily in situations of grave political conflict, whether that conflict is internal to a country, or straddles national borders.
It is in circumstances of grave, violent conflict that the normal (thank God!) human inhibitions against the killing and desecration of other human persons can rapidly dissolve… People in such circumstances can all too easily become entangled in frenzies of killing and atrocious violence of a type that in normal times they would find, quite rightly, to be quite abhorrent. War is itself a violent, tortured universe to inhabit, one that itself imposes grave rights abuses on everyone in its path.
Therefore, the best way to end the atrocities is to end the war. After the war has ended and people are on the path to the kind of sustainable peace in which their remaining differences can be solved through equality-based, non-violent, and rights-respecting means– that is the time to (as and when the people of that community choose to) explore issues of “accountability” about the past.
Many of the people worldwide who shout for “prosecutions!” have little idea of what sustained, atrocity-laden conflict does to societies and to the people who constitute them. From their little bubble-universes they think that a pertformance in a courtroom can somehow, “magically”, make everything right again.
Actually, building peace is both much harder–and at one level, much simpler– than that.
Let’s therefore keep the focus on doing all we can, including prayer, to help the peace negotiations over Darfur to succeed.
(P.s. You can read a little about the remarkable role that Sant’ Egidio played in shepherding the crucial peace negotiations in Mozambique, 1990-92, in this paper of mine. Also, here.)

Newsflash! Newsweek never tortured anybody!

The way the White House wants us to ‘think’ about things, they want to blame Newsweek for all the anti-US riots that occurred in Muslim countries last week– and you might think they want to blame Newsweek and the rest of the media for having invented the whole set of allegations about US torture of (mainly) Muslims, in the first place.
Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker seems to have gone into hiding. He should have stood his ground! Though the (un-named) military source who had attributed the claim about the Korans-in-toilets to a certain internal report later– under pressure– retracted that and said he wasn’t sure the claim was in that report after all, there are plenty of other reports from other sources of this having occurred in Gitmo.
Like the ones cited in this Human Rights Watch report.
Moreover, so far as I know neither Whitaker nor anyone on his staff ever tortured anybody– and far less did they ever put in place a whole globe-circling system of torture.
The American Civil Liberties Unon and the New York-based group Human Rights First have both done really groundbreaking work on the US torture issue over the past couple of years.
The ACLU has been doggedly filing “Freedom of Information” (FOIA) requests, to try to get various organs of the US government to do their democratic duty and release to US citizens reports that were written using the citizens’ very own tax dollars. So far it has pried 35,000 government documents into the open, some heavily edited, but many extremely damaging to the Bushies and their acolytes.
The ACLU’s latest report on the torture issue is here.
It includes this quote from ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer:

    “The government’s own documents describe literally hundreds of instances in which prisoners have been abused by U.S. military and intelligence personnel… In light of what the documents show, it is simply astounding that senior military and civilian officials still have not been held accountable.”

I like Human Rights First’s take on this issue of command responsibility. This is a page they have titled, “One year later [i.e. after the revelations of Abu Ghraib]: Where are they now?”
Learn all about these people:

    Don Rumsfeld– still Secdef…
    Alberto Gonzales– promoted to Attorney-General with the full “consent” of the U.S. Senate…
    Barbara Fast– now in charge of the Army’s main interrorgation training facility …
    Ricardo Sanchez– head of the Army’s V Corps in Europe… etc etc.

Seeing all these high-ups shrugging off any taint from the torture and abuse that have been happening– and that, indeed, continue to happen in various parts of the US gulag around the world–is really enough to make you feel sorry for Private Lynndie England and even, just a little bit, for her immediate abuser Charles Graner.
Actually, it’s worse than that the high-ups managed to “shrug off any taint”. It looks from their resumes as if establishing and implementing the torture system was a good, career-building move for just about everyone above the rank of Colonel. (Except Janis Karpinski.)

Hoagland nears the end of his powers

Jim Hoagland of the WaPo, who was one of the main, most influential, and most insistent voices in the commentatoriat who goaded a (never-reluctant) Bush administration into the truly disastrous war adventure in Iraq, nowadays seems to be having some second thoughts… Or is he?
He has this truly extraordinary piece in today’s WaPo, which shows, well, if not a distinct change of heart on the virtues of the invasion of Iraq, then at least some lofty (and very muddled-looking) self-distancing from it.
Look, I know the move. As an op-ed writer, you have to meet deadlines; and sometimes an issue is so much in the news that you feel you have to write about that issue. But either you can’t figure out exactly what to say; or else, what you want to say runs so much at odds with what you’ve said before that you have to do an awkward-looking bit of segueing to get into it.
That’s definitely how this extraordinary piece reads. It starts thus:

    President Bush and Vice President Cheney fight an inexorable tide that pushes their goal of restoring presidential and national power farther away even as they accelerate their efforts to reach it.
    They swim against a tide of the global fragmentation of power in all its forms — economic, political and military. More nations today possess the ability to make and sell inexpensive, good-quality shirt buttons than ever before. The same is true for costly but workable nuclear weapons.
    Located at the opposite ends of any spectrum of importance, the spread of consumer goods and of history’s deadliest weapons underlines the need to update our notions of power, whether we are ordinary shoppers or strategists working in the White House
    Thirty years ago Americans fantasized (in horror or delight) about U.S. troops occupying oil fields in the Middle East to guarantee low-cost energy. Today U.S. troops fight in Iraq — but China and India determine the record levels of world oil prices more than the White House does. The galloping consumption and fierce competition for supplies and future contracts by the two Asian giants make supply and demand dance on a knife’s edge….

Looks like he’s heading for a big critique of the administration’s militaristic power-grabbing?
But he ends up with this extremely clunky (and unoriginal) ending:

    What our leaders have to fear is fear itself. Fear will inhibit the vision and judgment needed to adjust and rebalance power on a global and equitable basis.

What the heck that is meant to mean, I have no idea.
I think the WaPo should just retire this tired old guy, pronto. And perhaps along the way some of us can go back over some of Hoagy’s past war-mongering columns and start laying some symbolic coffins of those thousands of Iraqis and Americans who have died because of the war he so successfully mongered right at his front doorstep.
That’s what Abraham Lincoln did to the secessionist General Robert E. Lee whose actions were responsible for scores of thousands of deaths back in the mid-19th centruy…. Nowadays, what used to be Lee’s front meadows– right up to the front door his house– is called Arlington National Cemetery.
So how about it, Jim? Cleveland Park US-Iraqi Cemetery…