Bangladesh U-Turn On Former PMs

Extracted from The BBC, 25 April 2007

Bangladesh's emergency government has lifted all restrictions on two of the country's most powerful politicians, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina.

Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina was no longer banned from returning from abroad, a government statement said.



It also said there were no restrictions on the movements of her arch rival Khaleda Zia, who has been held under virtual house arrest in Dhaka.

She has reportedly been under pressure to go into exile in Saudi Arabia.

'Under threat'

"All restrictions on the two former prime ministers are lifted," the government statement said.

"The government is lifting the restrictions [on Sheikh Hasina] in view of the views expressed in the media and different quarters."

The statement made no reference to comments by the US State Department earlier on Wednesday that democracy in Bangladesh was under threat.

"If the caretaker government does not take right decisions, there is a real threat to Bangladesh democracy and nobody wants to see that," spokesman Sean McCormack said.

The government's statement went on to say that - contrary to media reports - there had never been any pressure on Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) leader Khaleda Zia to leave the country, and there were no restrictions on her freedom of movement.

It is not clear whether Wednesday's announcement means that the two women will be free to resume their political careers and take part in elections which the government says will be held as soon as corruption in the country has been eradicated.

Khaleda Zia's family said last week that they had been told to prepare for imminent exile in Saudi Arabia, but the Saudi Arabian government reportedly declined to allow her into the kingdom - apparently because it was reluctant to take in an unwilling guest.

Attempts by the government to find another country for her to be exiled seem to have failed.

Khaleda Zia's son, Tareque Rahman, is one of around 160 politicians, businessmen and civil servants who have been arrested by the military-backed caretaker government on corruption charges.

The drive against corruption seems to have been welcomed by many ordinary Bangladeshis tired of seeing politicians and their relatives siphoning off the country's wealth.

'Clout'

The BBC's John Sudworth in Dhaka says that after days of political manoeuvring with the intention of sending the country's two most powerful political leaders into exile, the emergency government has seemingly backed down.

Sheikh Hasina, who was prevented from flying back to Dhaka on Sunday, has now been told that she can return.

She faces murder charges after Awami League members allegedly killed members of a rival political party during protests in Dhaka last year against the caretaker government prior to the imposition of a state of emergency.

Members of the emergency government had said that reform of the political system would be impossible with the two former prime ministers still on the scene.

Our correspondent says the two women seem to have won this particular battle with the government - which is perhaps a sign of just how much political clout they still wield.
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These two seahags are probably two of the worst examples of female leaders in the world (Angela Merkel is probably another example). The last thing a country that want's to rid itself from it's corrupt image needs is for the US to say that it will hinder democracy. The Bangladeshi emergency government made a huge mistake, these two should be locked up and for the good of democracy.

U.S. Had Emergency Plan For Attacking Israel In 1967

Taken from Haaretz, 23/04/2007
By Amir Oren,

For some time, the United States had had an emergency plan to attack Israel, a plan updated just prior to the 1967 war, aimed at preventing Israel from expanding westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank.

In May 1967, one of the U.S. commands was charged with the task of removing the plan from the safe, refreshing it and preparing for an order to go into action. This unknown aspect of the war was revealed in what was originally a top-secret study conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington. The full story is detailed in Haaretz' (printed) Independence Day Supplement.

In February 1968, an institute expert, L. Weinstein, wrote an article called "Critical Incident No. 14," about the U.S. involvement in the Middle East crisis of May-June 1967.Only 30 copies of his study were printed for distribution. Years later the material was declassified and can now be read by everyone, although details that are liable to give away sources' identities and operational ideas have remained censored.

Strike Command, the entity that was to have launched the attack on Israel, no longer exists. It was annulled in 1971 for domestic American reasons and superseded by Readiness Command, which was abolished in the 1980s in favor of Central Command (CENTCOM) which today includes forces in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan; and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

The general who oversaw the planning in 1967 was Theodore John ("Ted") Conway, then 56 and a four-star general, the head of Strike Command.

On May 20, 1967, according to L. Weinstein's confidential study for the Institute for Defense Analyses, cable No. 5886 of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was sent to EUCOM and STRICOM. STRICOM was asked to refresh the emergency plans for intervention in an Israeli-Arab war: one plan on behalf of Israel and the other, on behalf of the Arabs.

The basis for the directive was Washington's policy of support for the existence, independence and territorial integrity of all the states of the region. This translated into adherence to the Israeli-Arab armistice lines of 1949. The policy was not to allow Egypt, or any combination of Arab states, to destroy Israel, but also not to allow Israel to expand westward, into Sinai, or eastward, into the West Bank.

The American pressure in this regard brought the IDF back from El Arish in Operation Horev in 1949 and from Sinai in 1956. A version of it would appear in Henry Kissinger's directives after the IDF encircled Egypt's Third Army at the end of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Conway replied to the Joint Chiefs cable four days after it was sent. He was doubtful about combat intervention, and preferred an operation to evacuate American civilians from Israel and from Arab states. The next day, the Joint Chiefs asked Conway for his opinion about how the United States should act if the war were to be launched by an Arab action or, alternatively, by an Israeli strike.

"The ultimate objective would be to stop aggression and insure the territorial integrity of all the Middle Eastern states," he was informed in cable No. 6365 of the Joint Chiefs, with a copy to EUCOM.

Conway's reply to this, dated May 28, is described in the top-secret study as "a strong plea for complete impartiality." The United States was liable to lose its influence to the Soviets, the general warned, and therefore it must demonstrate "strict neutrality" and avoid open support for Israel. The true importance of the Middle East lay in the American-Soviet context of the Cold War, Conway argued, and the American stance must derive from those considerations, not from "local issues."

Only as a last resort should the United States take unilateral action - and then only to put an end to the fighting. In the estimation of the STRICOM commander, the Egyptian forces were deployed defensively, whereas the Israelis were deployed in rapid-strike offensive capability.

On May 29, Conway recommended that any U.S. intervention be launched early in order to ensure the territorial integrity of all the countries involved; restoring the status quo ante would become more complicated as the attacking army captured more territory.

It might be difficult to determine which side had launched the hostilities, he noted, but the American response should be identical in both cases: a display of force, warnings to both sides, and if that should prove insufficient, "air and naval action to stabilize the situation, enforce grounding of aviation of both sides plus attacks on all moving armor or active artillery."

Following the cease-fire, U.S. ground forces would be moved in for peacekeeping missions. The return of territories would be achieved primarily by diplomatic means, with military force to be used only if "absolutely necessary."

General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, barred the distribution of the planning concept to subordinate levels. A preliminary paper was prepared by June 5, the day the war erupted, and became outdated even before it could be used.

On June 6, when the success of the Israel Air Force was known, and as the divisions under IDF Generals Israel Tal, Ariel Sharon and Avraham Yoffe advanced into Sinai, the Joint Chiefs sent McNamara top-secret memorandum No. 315-67, recommending that the United States not intervene militarily, that it continue to work through the United Nations and bilateral diplomatic channels, including consultation with the Soviets, to stop the war, and that logistical support for all sides be suspended.

The American sigh of relief at the demise of the worst-case scenario - the danger that Israel would be destroyed - was replaced by the fear that the Arab defeat had been so crushing that the Soviets would intervene on their behalf, or at least would reap a diplomatic profit.

Because the United States did not know what Israel was aiming at, despite declarations by Eshkol and by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that Israel had no territorial ambitions, the administration "now felt that it was necessary to limit [the Israeli] success to reasonable bounds."

Two retired IDF major generals, Israel Tal and Shlomo Gazit, who was then head of research in Military Intelligence, said recently, upon hearing the secret plan of the U.S. military, that Israel had no knowledge of this.

The IDF fought the Egyptians, the Jordanians and the Syrians without imagining that it might find itself confronting the Americans as well, in their desert camouflage fatigues.

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I suppose the capture of the West Bank, Golan Heights and Shebba Farms does not count as Israeli Expansion in the eyes of the United States otherwise they would've pressured Israel to retreat. Israel is being used as a rottweiler to control all the other Middle-Easten countries, although some of these Arab countries already have dictators controlled by the US. One of those countries is Saudi Arabia which has had exceptional relationships with the White House. Not long ago, during the heated political atmosphere of the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, the then US secretary of state made veiled threats that the U.S. would invade and occupy Saudi oil fields, today they have done this in Iraq - well that explains the US foreign policy in the Middle East.

U.S. Officer Accused Of ‘Aiding Enemy’ In Iraq

Taken from The New York Times, April 27, 2007
By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, April 26 — The American military has charged a top commander at its main detention center here with nine violations of military law, including “aiding the enemy,” a rare and serious accusation that could carry a death sentence.

According to a military statement released Thursday, the officer, Lt. Col. William H. Steele, provided aid to the enemy between Oct. 1, 2005, and Oct. 31, 2006, “by providing an unmonitored cellular phone to detainees” at Camp Cropper, an expansive prison near Baghdad International Airport that held Saddam Hussein before he was hanged.

Colonel Steele, who oversaw one of several compounds at Camp Cropper as commander of the 451st Military Police Detachment, was also charged with several counts of illegally storing and marking classified information; failure to obey an order; possession of pornographic videos; dereliction of duty regarding government funds; and conduct unbecoming of an officer — for fraternizing with the daughter of a detainee since 2005, and for maintaining “an inappropriate relationship” with an interpreter in 2005 and 2006.

There were no further details given to explain the circumstances of the accusations.

Military officials said that Colonel Steele was detained last month and was now in Kuwait awaiting a military hearing to determine whether the case would proceed. They emphasized that he should be presumed innocent.

“Is there enough evidence or information that this needs to go to a court-martial?” said Lt. Col. Josslyn L. Aberle, a military spokeswoman. “That’s where we’re at right now.”

Walter Huffman, a former Army judge advocate general and now the dean of the Texas Tech University law school, said that a death sentence was unlikely, because to convict Colonel Steele of the most severe form of aiding the enemy, prosecutors would have to show that he intentionally endangered American troops or missions. In this particular case, he added, that would mean proving that he knew the cellphone was being used to make calls that would put Americans at risk. “That is a difficult charge to prove,” he said.

Mr. Huffman, who emphasized that he had not seen the specific charges or details of Colonel Steele’s case, said the fraternization charge sounded as if it was not code for sex but rather a reference to the simple impropriety of regular contact with a detainee’s relative. That would take on added seriousness in a Muslim country, where speaking to young women outside of one’s family is considered highly inappropriate.

He added that Colonel Steele’s rank and supervisory role at Camp Cropper magnified the seriousness of the allegations. “He’s the person in charge of enforcing the rules at the prison,” Mr. Huffman said. “It makes it an even more egregious offense because of the context.”

Regardless of the outcome, the case amounts to another public relations bruise for the American detention system. Camp Cropper was meant to signify reform. It was expanded in recent years as a replacement for Abu Ghraib, where American jailers photographed themselves humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners, and it now holds about 3,000 people.

But it has had its share of problems. Several detainees there have died mysteriously in the past year, with the most recent death occurring April 4. The causes of death for these detainees are rarely divulged.

The arrests and treatment of detainees at Camp Cropper is also the subject of a lawsuit filed in 2006 by an American security contractor who said he was unjustly held and mistreated at the prison after acting as an informant for the F.B.I. in cases involving corruption within the contracting company he worked for. A second plaintiff with a similar claim added his name to the complaint in February.

Colonel Steele appears to be only the second American officer accused of collaborating with the enemy since the war in Iraq started four years ago.

In September 2003, Capt. James J. Yee, a Muslim chaplain at the Guantánamo detention center in Cuba, was accused of mutiny, sedition, aiding the enemy, adultery and possession of pornography. The military dropped all the criminal charges the following March, citing national security concerns that would arise from the release of evidence against him. A month later, Captain Yee’s record was wiped clean when an Army general dismissed his convictions for adultery and pornography.

In Washington on Thursday, Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, told reporters that the violence of the war showed no signs of abating.

North of Baghdad, two Iraqi women and two children were believed to have been killed in an American airstrike that killed four insurgents, according to a military statement.

Soldiers were searching for car-bomb factories near Taji when they came under small-arms fire, the statement said. The soldiers called in an airstrike and later discovered all eight bodies at the destroyed building.

Citing the weapons in the building, a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, blamed Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for the women’s and children’s deaths.

The police said a suicide car bomber exploded his vehicle south of Khalis, in Diyala Province, on Thursday, killing six Iraqi policemen. The police said that four bodies showing signs of torture were also found nearby in a grove of palm trees.

In Baghdad, 26 bodies were found, a higher daily toll than in the first few weeks of the two-month-old security push, and roadside bombs, mortar attacks and car bombs across the capital killed at least 11 people and wounded scores more, according to an Interior Ministry official.

In northern Iraq, two suicide bombers detonated their explosives at an office of the Kurdistan Democratic Party near Mosul, killing three people and wounding 13, according to the mayor of Tal Afar, a city about 30 miles to the south.

The police also said gunmen in Tikrit had stormed the home of Hashim al-Majeed, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, and shot and killed his wife and daughter. Mr. Majeed, who disappeared soon after Mr. Hussein’s ouster in 2003, was not at home.

Reporting was contributed by Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Qais Mizher and Iraqi employees of The New York Times in Baghdad, and by Paul von Zielbauer and Michael Moss in New York.

7/7 ‘Mastermind’ Is Seized In Iraq

Taken from The Times, UK, April 28, 2007
By Sean O’Neill, Tim Reid and Michael Evans

The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans.

Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay.

Abd al-Hadi was taken into CIA custody last year, it emerged from US intelligence sources yesterday, in a move which suggests that he was interrogated for months in a “ghost prison” before being transferred to the internment camp in Cuba.

Abd al-Hadi, 45, was regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s most experienced, most intelligent and most ruthless commanders. Senior counter-terrorism sources told The Times that he was the man who, in 2003, identified Britain as the key battleground for exporting al-Qaeda’s holy war to Europe.

Abd al-Hadi recognised the potential for turning young Muslim radicals from Britain who wanted to become mujahidin in Afghanistan or Iraq into terrorists who could carry out attacks in their home country. He realised that their knowledge of Britain, possession of British passports and natural command of English made them ideal recruits. After al-Qaeda restructured its operations in Pakistan’s tribal areas he sought out young Britons for instruction at training camps. In late 2004 Abd al-Hadi met Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, from Leeds, at a militant camp in Pakistan and, in the words of a senior investigator, “retasked them” to become suicide bombers.

They were sent back to Britain where they led the terrorist cell that carried out the 7/7 bombings, killing 52 Tube and bus passengers.

Pakistani intelligence sources said that Abd al-Hadi was also in contact with Rachid Rauf, a Birmingham man now in prison in Pakistan and alleged to be a key figure in last summer’s alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners in mid-flight.

Abd al-Hadi has also been linked to a number of other foiled al-Qaeda plots to carry out attacks in Britain. But the Security Service, which has previously sent officials to question detainees at Guantanamo Bay, may not have the opportunity to question him directly.

The Government’s recently adopted position in favour of closing Guantanamo Bay is likely to act as a bar on agents travelling there. British Intelligence would have to rely on relaying questions it would like asked by American interrogators.

Security sources said they assessed Abd al-Hadi as a key operational commander, high up the chain in the al-Qaeda structure who was behind many key plots in the UK.

He had a close link with another arrested al-Qaeda figure and, the sources said, would have “a wealth of information”. He is thought to have been in contact with Osama bin Laden before his capture and might be able to provide information about his leader’s whereabouts.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said that Abd al-Hadi had been classified as a “high-value detainee” at Guantanamo, and joined 14 others, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, as the most senior terror suspects at the Cuba prison.

Mr Whitman refused to say when or where he was captured, or by whom. “Abd al-Hadi was trying to return to his native country, Iraq, to manage al-Qaeda's affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against Western targets,” Mr Whitman said.

He added that he was a key al-Qaeda paramilitary leader in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, and between 2002 and 2004 led efforts to attack US forces in Afghanistan with terrorist units based in Pakistan.

In a lecture this week Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, commander of Sctoland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command, said that the central al-Qaeda leadership was behind a spate of terror plots against Britain.

He said: “We have seen how al-Qaeda has been able to survive a prolonged multinational assault on its structures, personnel and logistics. It has certainly retained its ability to deliver centrally directed attacks here in the UK. In case after case, the hand of core al-Qaeda can be clearly seen.”

Sources said last night that few figures had been more important at the centre of the revived al-Qaeda. Abd al-Hadi is credited with forming its alliance with the insurgency in Iraq.

US officials said he was associated with leaders of other extremist groups allied with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Taleban.

Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, told The Times that catching Abd al-Hadi was important but that it did not spell the end of al-Qaeda.

He said Abd al-Hadi had been an important figure in developing al-Qaeda’s strategy in the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and also helped to redirect its terrorist strategy in Europe.

Mr Scheuer, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, said: “It is a blow for al-Qaeda, especially in Iraq, where it will have consequences.

“But al-Qaeda always plans for succession, and there will have been someone lined up to take his place. It is nonsense to think that al-Qaeda is dead.”

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How strange that in the same week George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, lashes out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in is new book, and Saudi Arabia captures 172 suspected terrorists linked to al-Qaida, we have this story were trying to link Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda and Iraq. A senate panel in September 2006 clearly stated that Saddam "was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime." It quotes an FBI report from June 2004 in which former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said in an interview that "Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden." The report concludes that postwar findings do not support a 2002 intelligence community report that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, possessed biological weapons or ever developed mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents. So is this a made up story or was Dick Cheney right?

Saudi Claims 172 Suspects Were Ready For Terror Attacks

Taken from the Guardian, UK, April 28, 2007
By Ian Black

Saudi authorities announced yesterday the arrest of 172 suspected terrorists linked to al-Qaida, some of them said to have been training as pilots and preparing suicide attacks on oil installations, public figures and military bases in the kingdom and abroad.

General Mansour al-Turki, security spokesman for the interior ministry, said the detainees had reached "an advance stage of readiness and what remained only was to set the zero hour for their attacks. They had the personnel, the money, the arms."

Most of those held were Saudi nationals. There were a smaller number of Yemenis and Nigerians, Arab media reports said last night. The ministry did not name the organisation the men belonged to, calling them only adherents to a "deviant ideology" - standard Saudi terminology for a jihadi groups.

Previous attacks have been claimed by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudi-backed al-Arabiya channel suggested they were linked to al-Qaida.

The ministry said some suspects had been trained in "turbulent areas", an apparent reference to Iraq. Some had been "sent to other countries to study flying in preparation for using them to carry out terrorist attacks inside the kingdom". The Saudi captives had sworn allegiance to their unnamed leader at the Kab'a in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, it said.

The ministry statement also said the men had operated in seven separate cells and had been found in possession of 20m riyals (£2.6m) as well as weapons and communications equipment.

One group planned to attack a prison in Jeddah.

The unprecedented scale of the arrests seemed to undermine official Saudi claims that jihadi terrorism had been all but eradicated by effective intelligence and security, a powerful publicity campaign and inducements to terrorists to repent. Some believed the announcement was intended to signal that vigilant security forces were safeguarding the world's largest oil producer and exporter.

The Saudi state TV channel al-Akhbariya broadcast footage of weapons discovered buried in the desert. These included AK-47 and other rifles, plastic explosives, magazines, and handguns wrapped in plastic sheeting. It showed investigators smashing tiled floors with hammers to uncover pipes containing weapons. In one scene, an official upends a pipe and bullets and packets of explosives spill out.

Prince Nayef, the powerful Saudi interior minister, signalled last week that an important security announcement was imminent. But western diplomats said yesterday they were puzzled by some of the details that had been released.

The large number suggested that some of those arrested were likely to have been neighbours, acquaintances and contacts of a much smaller number of militants. It also seemed likely the seven cells had been rounded up separately but announced simultaneously to make a greater public impact.

According to official figures, about 144 foreigners and Saudis, including security personnel, and 120 militants have died in attacks and clashes with police since May 2003, when al-Qaida suicide bombers hit western housing compounds in Riyadh.

In May 2004, 22 people, including an American, a Briton and an Italian, died in an attack on oil company and housing compounds in Khobar.

Days later, gunmen killed Simon Cumbers, an Irish cameraman working for the BBC, and seriously wounded his British colleague Frank Gardner as they filmed in Riyadh.

The last terrorist attack in the kingdom was in February, when four French expatriates were shot dead near Medina.

Recommended Reading:
Telegraph, UK, 03/04/2007: Saudi Arabia Hails Project To Reform Fighters

Ex-C.I.A. Chief, In Book, Assails Cheney On Iraq

Taken from The New York Times, April 27, 2007
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, April 26 — George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.


George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, foreground, in March 2003. Mr. Tenet now says there was never a “serious debate” about the Iraq threat.

The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.

A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.

As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”

Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.

Despite such sweeping indictments, Mr. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Mr. Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is portrayed personally in a largely positive light, with particular praise for the his leadership after the 2001 attacks. “He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed,” Mr. Tenet writes of the president, whom he describes as a blunt-spoken kindred spirit.

But Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.

Mr. Tenet describes helping to kill a planned speech by Mr. Cheney on the eve of the invasion because its claims of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq went “way beyond what the intelligence shows.”

“Mr. President, we cannot support the speech and it should not be given,” Mr. Tenet wrote that he told Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney never delivered the remarks.

Mr. Tenet hints at some score-settling in the book. He describes in particular the extraordinary tension between him and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, in internal debate over how the president came to say erroneously in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.

He describes an episode in 2003, shortly after he issued a statement taking partial responsibility for that error. He said he was invited over for a Sunday afternoon, back-patio lemonade by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state. Mr. Powell described what Mr. Tenet called “a lively debate” on Air Force One a few days before about whether the White House should continue to support Mr. Tenet as C.I.A. director.

“In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view.”

He writes that the controversy over who was to blame for the State of the Union error was the beginning of the end of his tenure. After the finger-pointing between the White House and the C.I.A., he wrote, “My relationship with the administration was forever changed.”

Mr. Tenet also says in the book that he had been “not at all sure I wanted to accept” the Medal of Freedom. He agreed after he saw that the citation “was all about the C.I.A.’s work against terrorism, not Iraq.”

He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful.

“It may have worked more than three years ago,” he wrote. “My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”

Mr. Tenet says he decided to write the memoir in part because the infamous “slam dunk” episode had come to define his tenure at C.I.A.

He gives a detailed account of the episode, which occurred during an Oval Office meeting in December 2002 when the administration was preparing to make public its case for war against Iraq.

During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.

“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter — or maybe even this book.”

Mr. Tenet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004.

Asked about Mr. Tenet’s assertions, a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, defended the prewar deliberations on Thursday. “The president made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein for a number of reasons, mainly the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s own actions, and only after a thorough and lengthy assessment of all available information as well as Congressional authorization,” the spokesman said.

The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.

“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counterterrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.

Mr. Tenet confesses to “a black, black time” two months after the 2001 attacks when, sitting in front of his house in his favorite Adirondack chair, he “just lost it.”

“I thought about all the people who had died and what we had been through in the months since,” he writes. “What am I doing here? Why me?” Mr. Tenet gives a vigorous defense of the C.I.A.’s program to hold captured Qaeda members in secret overseas jails and to question them with harsh techniques, which he does not explicitly describe.

Mr. Tenet expresses puzzlement that, since 2001, Al Qaeda has not sent “suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day.”

“I do know one thing in my gut,” he writes. “Al Qaeda is here and waiting.”

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.

Fascist America, In 10 Easy Steps

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Taken from The Guardian, UK, April 24, 2007

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security - remember who else was keen on the word "homeland" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war" against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will be no defined end."

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next election day.

Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not "coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents.

Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the "treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy "November traitors".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant". He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931.

Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the "what ifs".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the "what ifs". For if we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.

Pentagon Challenged On Lynch And Tillman

Taken from The New York Times, April 24, 2007
By JOHN HOLUSHA

Military and other administration officials created a heroic story about the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman to distract attention from setbacks in Iraq and the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the slain man’s younger brother, Kevin Tillman, said today.

Testifying before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Mr. Tillman said the military knew almost immediately that Corporal Tillman, an Army Ranger who left a career as a pro football player to enlist, had been killed accidentally in Afghanistan in April 2004 by fire from his own unit. But officials chose to put a “patriotic glow” on his death, he said.

Mr. Tillman said the decision to award his brother a Silver Star and to say that he died heroically fighting the enemy was “utter fiction” that was intended to “exploit Pat’s death.”

Former Pvt. Jessica Lynch leveled similar criticism today at the hearing about the initial accounts given by the Army of her capture in Iraq. Ms. Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi hospital in dramatic fashion by American troops after she suffered serious injuries and was captured in an ambush of her truck convoy in March 2003.

In her testimony this morning, she said she did not understand why the Army put out a story that she went down firing at the enemy.

“I’m confused why they lied,” she said.

Mr. Tillman and Ms. Lynch appeared at a hearing called to examine why “inaccurate accounts of these two incidents” were put out by the administration. Today’s session was part of the Democratically-controlled Congress’s effort to hold the Bush Administration accountable for its conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other issues.

Pentagon officials and military representatives were scheduled to testify later in the hearing.

Ms. Lynch said she could not know why she was depicted as a “Rambo from West Virginia,” when in fact she was riding in a truck, not fighting, when she was injured.

Dr. Gene Bolles, a doctor who treated Ms. Lynch at a hospital in Germany after she was rescued, said that her injuries, while extensive, were not the result of bullet wounds, as first described.

Mr. Tillman’s tone was more bitter than Ms. Lynch’s. He described the early accounts of his brother’s death as “deliberate and calculated lies” and “deliberate acts of deceit,” rather than the result of confusion or innocent error.

For her part, Ms. Lynch said in her testimony that other members of her unit had acted with genuine heroism that deserved the attention she received. “The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideas of heroes, and they don’t need to be told elaborate tales,” she said.

Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, the chairman of the committee, said the hearings were intended to determine the “sources and motivations” for the erroneous accounts and to see whether Administration officials had been held accountable for them.

Canadian Row Over Afghan 'Abuse'

Taken from The BBC, 24 April 2007
By Lee Carter

Canadian opposition parties are calling for the country's defence minister to resign following allegations that detainees were tortured in Afghanistan.

The torture is said to have occurred after Canadian soldiers transferred suspects to Afghan security forces.



About 2,500 Canadian soldiers are involved in combat operations against insurgents in southern Afghanistan.

Canada signed a controversial agreement two years ago to hand over Taleban prisoners to the Afghan authorities.

'Electric cables'
At least 30 detainees told Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper that they were tortured in Afghan prisons after being handed over by Canadian armed forces based in Kandahar to Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security.

The allegations of brutality range from beatings to starvation, to being left naked outside in freezing temperatures.

Some of the men also say they were whipped with electrical cables.

In the face of a storm of opposition questions in the Canadian parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defiantly defended the controversial prisoner exchange deal.

He said the allegations would be investigated by Afghanistan's Independent Human Rights Commission, which agreed in February to monitor the fate of detainees.

Canadian Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor also promised that the allegations would be looked at seriously.

But two professors who specialise in international law and human rights held a news conference in Ottawa to warn the government that if the allegations are true, then Canadians may face international war crimes prosecution.

One of the professors, Amir Attaran, introduced research in February which raised the possibility that some detainees may also have been abused while in Canadian custody.

Buddhist Monks Put The Fist In Pacifist As They Brawl In Street

Taken from The Times, UK, April 21, 2007
By Associated Press

Rival groups of Buddhist monks brawled in the streets of the Cambodian capital yesterday during a protest march.

The clashes came as about 50 monks demonstrated in Phnom Penh against religious restrictions on colleagues across the border in southern Vietnam.









The marchers, who said that they were from southern Vietnam, were confronted by another band of six monks outside a Buddhist temple. The groups clashed in a fist fight and some of the protesters tossed water bottles at their opponents. One monk was injured in the brawl.

It was not clear if the monks opposing the march were acting independently or under someone’s orders. The protesters marched with banners demanding that the Hanoi Government stop limiting the religious freedom of ethnic Cambodians in southern Vietnam.

“The Vietnamese authorities have forced many Cambodian monks there to defrock,” said Lim Yuth, who took part in the march.

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And I thought that they were the peaceful ones!, What next - bullet proof monks? (I think someone has already made a film) Oh well, nothing surprises me in this wacky world! Lets hope they don't move to using any kind of heavy arsenal, we don't want to start an arms race between the two fractions - do we?. I can imagine the Chinese & Russians fighting the US, UK and France to arm these groups. One group will be labled terrorists whilst the other freedom fighters. (yes...lets not go there).

Chinese Couple Sue Yahoo! In US Over Torture Case

Taken from The Independent, UK, 20 April 2007
By Clifford Coonan

In a brave legal action against the great firewall of China, a jailed political prisoner and his wife have sued Yahoo! in a US court, accusing the internet firm of contributing to torture by helping authorities identify dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.

Wang Xiaoningwas imprisoned in September 2003 for 10 years for the crime of "incitement to subvert state power" after he emailed electronic journals calling for democratic reform and an end to single-party rule in a Yahoo! group in 2000 and 2001.

He was arrested by Chinese police in September 2002 and claims he was kicked and beaten during his detention.

Mr Wang and his wife Yu Ling claim the Hong Kong unit of Yahoo! provided mainland police with information linking Mr Wang to the postings, a claim that Yahoo! denies.

An engineer by profession, Mr Wang hails from Shenyang in China's industrial north-east, and he once famously described the Communist Party as "outwardly democratic but inwardly despotic" in one of his essays. Ms Yu, who lives in China still, is putting herself at risk by putting her name to the lawsuit.

The couple made their claim under US laws, which allow lawsuits from abroad to protect people against torture, and it is the first time anyone has used the legislation against an internet company for its activities in China.

The lawsuit was filed with help from the Washington-based World Organisation for Human Rights USA. In a vivid illustration of how internet censorship in China works with complicity from the big international web companies, I was unable to open the organisation's website using Google as it is blocked by the authorities.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages and an injunction to stop Yahoo! identifying political dissidents to Chinese police.

"While in custody, plaintiffs were subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, including arbitrary, prolonged and indefinite detention, for expressing their free speech rights and for using the internet to communicate about democracy and human rights matters," ran the text of their law case, filed with a district court in northern California.

This lawsuit names Yahoo!, its Hong Kong subsidiary and Alibaba.com, China's largest e-commerce firm, as defendants. The California-based Yahoo! bought a 40 per cent stake in Alibaba in a £500m deal in 2005.

China has 134 million internet users and is the world's second largest market, making it extremely attractive to the major web companies.

Google famously bowed down to the demands of the Chinese net nanny by allowing political censorship of its search engine.

Domestic internet giants such as Sohu and Baidu, along with China sites operated by Yahoo! and Microsoft, all routinely block searches on politically sensitive terms.

Blogs are regularly shut down, there are tens of thousands of net police monitoring the internet and searches are routinely blocked.

In 2005, Yahoo! was accused of supplying data that was used to jail for 10 years Shi Tao, a business journalist in Hunan province, for leaking state secrets to an overseas pro-democracy site apparently by using his Yahoo! email account.

Yahoo! sticks to its line that anyone doing business in China is forced to obey Chinese law, but human rights groups link it to a number of cases, including the case of Shi Tao, and the negative publicity has not helped Yahoo!'s image.

The human rights group Amnesty accuses Yahoo!, as well as Microsoft and Google, of facilitating or colluding in China's censorship of the net. Amnesty rejects the argument that the companies are "bringing the internet to China" , saying they are merely interested in getting into the market.

Chechnya Massacre Accused On The Run

Taken from The Sydney Morning Herald, April 20, 2007

MOSCOW: Three members of the Russian special forces who were being prosecuted for massacring a group of Chechen civilians have gone on the run. The three men in the highly publicised case had been granted bail despite protests by the victims' families.

Eduard Ulman, Alexander Kalagansky and Vladimir Voyevodin had previously admitted shooting six Chechens, including a pregnant woman, on a mountain road in southern Chechnya in January 2002.

However, they claimed they were innocent because they were following orders. Their escape is an embarrassment to the Kremlin, which has struggled to persuade its critics that it is serious about holding war criminals to account after more than 10 years of conflict in Chechnya.

A warrant was issued for the men's arrest after they failed to appear for two hearings. Last week, prosecutors demanded the soldiers receive prison terms of between 18 and 23 years.

Murat Musaev, a lawyer for the victims' families, said the court had repeatedly refused requests to detain the defendants during their prosecution. "We were afraid this would happen," Mr Musaev said. "It was clear they would be found guilty."

The soldiers are alleged to have mistakenly opened fire on a minibus carrying civilians, killing one and wounding two. The court heard that after bandaging the wounded, Captain Ulman's superiors instructed him to kill the five survivors, apparently in an effort to cover up the initial blunder.

Poison: KGB Men To Face Litvinenko Murder Charges

Taken from the Daily Mail, UK, 22nd April 2007
By CHRISTOPHER LEAKE

Scotland Yard detectives are to issue arrest warrants against three former KGB officers suspected of poisoning ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

Police have told sources close to Mr Litvinenko's widow Marina that they intend to lay charges of murder and poisoning against the men, who met the victim three weeks before his death in London.

The move will damage the already strained relationship between Downing Street and the Kremlin, which is almost certain to block any request for the men's arrest and extradition.


Accusation: Tycoon Boris Berezovsky, bottom, claims Vladimir Putin is behind the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, top

Warrants are expected to be issued against Andrei Lugovoy, Dmitri Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko within the next few weeks.

All three former agents have vehemently protested their innocence of any involvement in the murder plot. They all claim that they, too, were contaminated with the deadly radioactive material polonium-210 which poisoned Mr Litvinenko, a strong critic of President Vladimir Putin's regime.

Mr Putin's government is already furious with Tony Blair for granting political asylum to billionaire dissident Boris Berezovsky, who has continued to demand the overthrow of the Russian leader from his UK base.

Tensions increased further on Friday when EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson warned that relations with Moscow contained 'a level of misunderstanding, or even mistrust, we have not seen since the end of the Cold War'.

Forty-three-year-old Mr Litvinenko, himself a former KGB officer who had been granted political asylum to live in Britain, suffered a horrific death in a London hospital on November 23 last year after poison caused his hair to drop out and his vital organs to close down.

Mr Litvinenko had previously met the three prime suspects - who are now all wealthy businessmen based in Moscow - at the Millennium Hotel in Piccadilly and a nearby sushi bar.

The Metropolitan Police refused to comment on the murder inquiry, but Litvinenko family sources told The Mail on Sunday police had enough evidence to bring charges 'within three weeks'.

Britain has no extradition treaty with Russia, meaning that any trial would most probably have to be held in Moscow with the co-operation of the authorities there.

The Russians want Mr Berezovsky to face trial for calling last week for a revolution to overthrow President Putin and have twice demanded his extradition from Britain.

Mr Berezovsky, who has several substantial homes in the UK, said during a business trip to Israel last week: "I have no doubt that my extradition from Britain is impossible. However much the Russian prosecutors would want it, I didn't break Russian or British laws."

When asked about British unease over his comments on toppling President Putin, Mr Berezovsky said: "I did not get political asylum in Britain just to shut up." And, repeating earlier attacks on Mr Putin, whom he accused of corruption before escaping Russia, Mr Berezovsky added: "Any other way of changing this anti-constitutional regime, except for a coercive one which includes revolution, is impossible.

"I repeat it once again. And I am not scared at all that as a result I can be extradited."

Mrs Litvinenko, 44, who called her late husband by his pet name "Sasha', and her 12-year-old son Anatoly have been under police protection at a secret address ever since her husband's death.

Before he died, her husband blamed Mr Putin and his regime for his murder, a claim strongly denied by the Kremlin.

In December, nine Scotland Yard detectives flew to Moscow as part of their investigation. They were not allowed to interview Mr Lugovoy or Mr Kovtun directly, although they were present when Russian police officers interviewed them. They were not granted any access to Mr Sokolenko.

Senior Russian prosecutor Konstantin Nikonov told The Mail on Sunday last night: "We have no information yet that the British authorities have requested moves to bring charges against Mr Lugovoy, Mr Kovtun and Mr Sokolenko."

The Crown Prosecution Service said no decisions had been taken about charges in the Litvinenko case.

US Marines Granted Haditha Immunity

Taken from Al-Jezeera News Agency, APRIL 21, 2007

The US Marine Corps has dropped all charges against a sergeant accused in the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha in 2005, and granted at least seven more marines immunity.

The decision to drop charges against Sergeant Sanick Dela Cruz, 24, was made on Tuesday by Lieutenant-General James Mattis who is overseeing the case.



Military prosecutors have since given immunity to at least seven marines and they may be called to testify at the trial of troops accused in the Haditha killings, according to leaked documents obtained by the Associated Press.

Charges dismissed

Dela Cruz had been charged with unpremeditated murder and could have received up to life in prison for the deaths of five Iraqi civilians in the November 19, 2005, killings.

He has been granted immunity from prosecution and must testify at upcoming hearings for other marines charged in the Haditha case.

Dan Marino, Dela Cruz's lawyer, declined to comment.

On the day of the killings, a marine squad was in Haditha, a town in Anbar province, when their convoy was hit by a roadside bomb killing one marine. In response, the marines raided several homes and killed 24 Iraqis, including women and children.

Dela Cruz and three other marines were charged in December with unpremeditated murder in the deaths.

The marines say they believed they were under attack in the wake of the roadside bomb blast and followed procedures to defend themselves.

Other marines granted immunity include an officer who told troops to raid a house and a sergeant who took photographs of the dead but later deleted them from his camera, according to the Associated Press.

The immunity orders ensure that any testimony the marines volunteer cannot be used against them.

Lieutenant-Colonel Sean Gibson declined on Friday to comment on individual cases due to the ongoing nature of the investigation.

Iraqis 'devalued'

In a separate investigation, a US army general concluded the Marine Corps chain of command in Iraq ignored signs of "serious misconduct" in the Haditha killings, The Washington Post reported.

A report by Major-General Eldon Bargewell found officers may have willfully ignored reports of the civilian deaths to protect themselves and their units from blame.

Bargewell concluded that commanders fostered a tendency that devalued Iraqis to the extent that US soldiers considered the deaths of innocents insignificant.

The report, now unclassified, focuses on the reporting of the Haditha incident and the training and command climate within the Marine Corps leadership.

It does not address the November 19, 2005, incident in detail.

US Builds Baghdad Wall To Keep Sunnis And Shias Apart

Taken from The Guardian, UK, April 20, 2007
By Mark Tran

US soldiers are building a three-mile wall to separate one of Baghdad's Sunni enclaves from surrounding Shia neighbourhoods, it emerged today.The move is part of a contentious security plan that has fuelled fears of the Iraqi capital's Balkanisation.



When the barrier is finished, the minority Sunni community of Adamiya, on the eastern side of the River Tigris, will be completely gated. Traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers will provide the only access, the US military said.

"Shias are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," Captain Scott McLearn, of the US 407th brigade support battalion, told the Associated Press.

The project, which began on April 10, is being worked on almost nightly, with cranes swinging enormous concrete barriers into place.

Although Baghdad is rife with barriers around marketplaces and areas such as the heavily fortified Green Zone, this is the first in the city to be set up on sectarian lines.

The concrete wall, which will be up to 12ft high, "is one of the centrepieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence," US officials said.

The officials said the barrier would allow authorities to screen people entering and leaving Adamiya "while keeping death squads and militia groups out".

The construction - which has been nicknamed the "great wall of Adamiya" - is not the first time US military planners have attempted to isolate hostile regions.

In 2005, attempts were made to surround the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra with raised earth barriers to prevent insurgents from entering and leaving. A similar strategy was also deployed in both Tal Afar and Falluja.

General David Petraeus, the new US commander in Iraq, said he believed the tactics in Tal Afar, close to the Syrian border, were successful - but the area has since fallen back under insurgent control.

Critics of the scheme said it had been tried in past counter-insurgency campaigns in Vietnam and Algeria, but found wanting.

Some Sunnis living in Adamiya have welcomed the attempt to improve security but warned that it was another sign of the deep hostility between Sunnis and Shias.

Others were sceptical about the latest initiative to staunch the bloodshed in Baghdad, which reached new heights when a series of suicide bombings killed more than 200 people in a single day this week.

"I don't think this wall will solve the city's serious security problems," Ahmed Abdul-Sattar, a 35-year-old government worker, told the Associated Press. "It will only increase the separation between our people, which has been made so much worse by the war."

Meanwhile, the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, will today arrive in Iraq, where he is expected to meet sectarian leaders and government officials in Baghdad.

In his third trip to the country in four months, he is expected to put pressure on the Shia prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, to move faster on reconciliation with the Sunnis, who have been elbowed aside since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

"The clock is ticking," Mr Gates told reporters yesterday. "I know it's difficult ... but I think that it's very important that they bend every effort to getting this legislation done as quickly as possible."

In an ominous sign for the US, an insurgent coalition yesterday announced an "Islamic cabinet" in an attempt to provide an alternative to the country's US-backed administration.

The Islamic State of Iraq group named the head of al-Qaida in Iraq as its "minister of war". The alliance of eight insurgent groups first emerged in October, claiming to hold territory in Sunni-dominated areas of western and central Iraq.
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With Harry Reid's comments that "this war is lost" and Mr Bush's troop build-up plan was "not accomplishing anything" is this the way to obtain peace in Iraq or is this another way of divide and conquer? Building walls has been in the news for several months. First the planned Saudi walls on the border of Iraq, followed by the US-Mexico wall to keep our illegal immigrants. The only walls that have come down or are disappearing are the Berlin wall and the Great Wall of China.

It is said that the barrier would make it more difficult for suicide bombers, death squads and militia fighters from sectarian factions to attack one another and slip back to their home turf. But what about the residents and their neighbours? Sunnis and Shiites living in the shadow of the barrier are united in their contempt for it.

Several residents likened the wall to the barriers built by Israel around some Palestinians areas. "Are we in the West Bank?" quoted Abu Qusay, a pharmacist, in the Sydney Morning Herald Newspaper. "Are they trying to divide us into different sectarian cantons?" said Abu Ahmed, a Sunni shop owner in Adhamiya. "This will deepen the sectarian strife and only serve to abort efforts aimed at reconciliation." Some of his customers come from Shiite or mixed neighbourhoods that are now cut off by the barrier.