US Marine 'Shot Unarmed Iraqis'

Maj. Gen. Richard A. Huck, the general who led a division in charge of the marines who killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005 testified Thursday that he was kept from weighing accusations that the killings were illegal because his subordinate officers withheld information for nearly three months - yeah right! Here is the full story...

Taken from The BBC, Thursday, 10 May 2007

A US Marine who led the unit accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha shot five men as they stood with their hands in the air, another marine said.

Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich then told his comrades to lie about it and blame the Iraqi army, a court heard on Wednesday.

Sgt Sanick Dela Cruz was speaking at a hearing for one of the four officers charged with dereliction of duty for not investigating the killings.

Three other marines have been charged with second-degree murder.

Iraqi witnesses say the shootings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb that had killed Lance Cpl Miguel Terrazas as his convoy drove through Haditha, 240km (150 miles) north-west of Baghdad, on 19 November 2005.

'Bad thing'
Sgt Dela Cruz also told the military courtroom at Camp Pendleton in California that he urinated on the body of an Iraqi civilian.

He told the court of the distress he felt after discovering the explosion had ripped Lance Cpl Terrazas, known as TJ, in half.

"I know it was a bad thing what I've done, but I done it because I was angry TJ was dead and I pissed on one Iraqi's head," he said.

He also testified that after the explosion Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich had shot dead five men as they stood by a white car with the hands in the air.

"They were just standing, looking around, had hands up," he said.

"Then I saw one of them drop in the middle."

"Looked to my left, saw Sgt Wuterich shooting."

Afterwards Sgt Dela Cruz said he himself had "sprayed" the bodies with gunfire.

"I knew they were dead, I wanted to make sure," he explained.

Immunity
Sgt Wuterich then shot each of the men in the upper body and head, Sgt Dela Cruz testified.

"He went to every single one of them, sir, and shot them," he added.

"He told me that if anybody asked, they were running away and the Iraqi army shot them."

Sgt Wuterich's lawyer, Neal Puckett, said Sgt Dela Cruz's account was "false" and that he had told investigators up to five different versions of the events.

"It's unfortunate that in exchange for his freedom he's being forced to testify against his brothers," Mr Puckett told the Associated Press.

In April, the Marine Corps dropped all charges against Sgt Dela Cruz and granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony.

If found guilty, the three marines charged with second-degree murder could face life imprisonment.

The Haditha inquiry is just one of a number the US military has been conducting into incidents of alleged unlawful killings by US forces in Iraq.

De Menezes Officers Will Not Be Disciplined

Taken from Yahoo News, May 11 2007
By Tim Castle, Reuters

London - Eleven officers involved in the fatal shooting of an innocent Brazilian in the mistaken belief he was a suicide bomber will not face disciplinary action, a police watchdog said on Friday.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission said the armed and surveillance officers would not face a police tribunal over the July 22, 2005 killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old electrician who was living in London.

But the commission said it had not made any decision on disciplinary action against the four commanders and tactical advisors involved in the botched operation.

It was reserving that decision until after a court case due to start in October in which London's Metropolitan Police faces a corporate prosecution under health and safety laws.

The De Menezes family said it was "gravely disappointed."

Police officers, believing de Menezes to be a suicide bomber, shot him seven times in the head after he boarded a London underground train.

The shooting came amid high tension in London over the threat of suicide attacks. Just 15 days earlier, four British Islamists had blown themselves up on underground trains and a bus, killing 52 people.

IPCC Chairman Nick Hardwick said he had concluded there was "no realistic prospect of disciplinary charges being upheld against any of the firearms or surveillance officers involved."

He said he had reached the decision "on the basis of the evidence I have available to me now or any development that might reasonably be foreseen."

He said the fact he was not yet ready to reach a conclusion about the commanding officers "should not be assumed to give any indication of what my eventual decision will be."

The De Menezes family said in a statement: "the family are again gravely disappointed that exculpatory decisions are being made about officers directly responsible for the killing of an innocent man before they have had access to the evidence ..."

"The family are given no relief to their agony, grief and anxiety caused by their lack of access to all the evidence ..."

Last July, state prosecutors said no police officer would face criminal charges over the shooting.

The Metropolitan Police said the shooting of De Menezes was "a matter of very deep regret" and that its "continued thoughts are with his family."

"We have apologised publicly and in private to them and we would again like to take this opportunity to say sorry for this tragedy," it said in a statement on Friday.

The Terrorist We Tolerate

The administration's botched handling of Luis Posada Carriles says a lot about Bush's so-called war on terror.

Taken from the Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2007
Opininon By Rosa Brooks

LIKE PIRATES, terrorists are supposedly hostis humani generis — the "enemy of all mankind." So why is the Bush administration letting one of the world's most notorious terrorists stroll freely around the United States?

I'm talking about a man who was — until 9/11 — perhaps the most successful terrorist in the Western Hemisphere. He's believed to have masterminded a 1976 plot to blow up a civilian airliner, killing all 73 people on board, including teenage members of Cuba's national fencing team. He's admitted to pulling off a series of 1997 bombings aimed at tourist hotels and nightspots. Today, he's living illegally in the United States, but senior members of the Bush administration — the very guys who declared war on terror just a few short years ago — don't seem terribly bothered.

I'm talking about Luis Posada Carriles. That's not a household name for most U.S. citizens, but for many in Latin America, Posada is as reviled as Osama bin Laden is in the United States.

The Cuban-born Posada was trained by the CIA at the School of the Americas in 1961. From Venezuela, he later planned the successful 1976 bombing of a civilian Cuban jetliner (apparently with the knowledge of the CIA). He was arrested for the crime, but he escaped from a Venezuelan prison before standing trial.

Posada later aided Ollie North's illegal efforts to get arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, tried repeatedly to assassinate Fidel Castro and was behind a 1997 string of Havana hotel bombings. Recently declassified U.S. government documents suggest that, throughout most of his career, Posada remained in close contact with the CIA.

Posada entered the U.S. illegally in 2005. Human rights groups and the Cuban and Venezuelan governments urged that he be tried or extradited for his terrorist activities, but for several months the Bush administration denied that Posada was even in the United States.

On May 17, 2005, the Miami Herald shamed the administration into action by publishing a front-page interview with Posada (who sipped his peach drink on his Florida balcony, described his leisure reading and commented cheerfully that at first he "thought the [U.S.] government was looking for me" but eventually realized that U.S. officials had no interest in finding him).

Only then did the administration detain Posada — but on immigration charges, not terrorism-related charges.

Since 2005, the administration seems to have done everything in its power to botch the immigration case against Posada, mishandling it so blatantly that on Wednesday an exasperated federal judge declared herself "left with no choice" but to throw out the indictment. Although a different judge previously ordered Posada deported, Posada can't legally be extradited to Venezuela because the court concluded that he might be tortured there.

So for now, Posada's a free man — even though the administration has sufficient evidence to arrest him for his role in either the 1976 airliner bombing or the 1997 Havana bombings. For that matter, Posada easily could be detained under Section 412 of the Patriot Act, which calls for the mandatory detention of aliens suspected of terrorism.

The administration's approach to Posada contrasts jarringly with its approach to suspected Al Qaeda terrorists. With the latter, the administration wastes no time on legal niceties. Foreign nationals have been illegally "rendered" to countries where they faced torture, interrogated in secret CIA prisons and sent to languish at Guantanamo, sometimes on the flimsiest of evidence.

Even U.S. citizens suspected of terrorist activities have been dubbed "unlawful enemy combatants" and deprived of their constitutional rights. So why is the administration dragging its feet on arresting and charging Posada?

It's not as if the evidence against Posada is seriously in dispute. In 1998, for instance, he "proudly admitted authorship of the hotel bomb attacks" to the New York Times, "describ[ing] them as acts of war intended to cripple a totalitarian regime by depriving it of foreign tourism and investment." He dismissed the civilian casualties as "sad" but assured the reporter that he slept "like a baby." (When asked about these admissions in 2005 by the Miami Herald, he coyly replied, "Let's leave it to history.")

If all this sounds eerily familiar, it should. We've heard the same callous justifications for terrorism from Bin Laden and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The administration's failure to make serious efforts to prosecute Posada is hypocritical but politically expedient. A trial might expose past CIA misdeeds and risk alienating Florida's hard-line Cuban exiles, a voting bloc the administration has long cherished.

After 9/11, the phrase "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" went out of fashion. But though no one will openly admit it, the idea still seems to hold some currency within the Bush administration.

Aussie Software Pirate Extradited

Proof that American Laws (particulary corporate laws) are greater than the domestic laws of any other country as well as international laws...

Taken from The Sydney Morning Herald, May 7, 2007
Kenneth Nguyen

BEFORE he was extradited to the United States, Hew Griffiths, from Berkeley Vale in NSW, had never even set foot in America. But he had pirated software produced by American companies.

Now, having been given up to the US by former justice minister Chris Ellison, Griffiths, 44, is in a Virginia cell, facing up to 10 years in an American prison after a guilty plea late last month.



Griffiths' case - involving one of the first extraditions for intellectual property crime - has been a triumph for US authorities, demonstrating their ability to enforce US laws protecting US companies against Australians in Australia, with the co-operation of the Australian Government.

"Our agents and prosecutors are working tirelessly to nab intellectual property thieves, even where their crimes transcend international borders," US Attorney Chuck Rosenberg said.

In some corners of the Australian legal community, however, there is concern about Griffiths' case. In a recent article for the Australian Law Journal, NSW Chief Judge in Equity, Peter Young, wrote: "International copyright violations are a great problem. However, there is also the consideration that a country must protect its nationals from being removed from their homeland to a foreign country merely because the commercial interests of that foreign country are claimed to have been affected by the person's behaviour in Australia and the foreign country can exercise influence over Australia."

Griffiths, a Briton, has lived in Australia since the age of seven. From his home base on the central coast of NSW, he served as the leader of a group named Drink Or Die, which "cracked" copy-protected software and media products and distributed them free of cost. Often seen with long hair and bare feet, Griffiths did not make money from his activities, and lived with his father in a modest house.

But Drink or Die's activities did cost American companies money — an estimated $US50 million ($A60 million), if legal sales were substituted for illegal downloads undertaken through Drink or Die. It also raised the ire of US authorities.

In 2003, the US Department of Justice charged Griffiths with violating the copyright laws of the US, and requested his extradition from Australia. Senator Ellison signed a notice for Griffiths' arrest and Australian Federal Police arrested him at his home.

Griffiths fought the prospect of extradition through the courts for three years, in which time he was denied bail and detained in prison. He indicated that he would be willing to plead guilty to a breach of Australian copyright law, which meant he could serve time in Australia.

Last year, Griffiths ran out of avenues for appeal in Australia. His fate lay in the hands of Senator Ellison, who had the power to refuse Griffiths' extradition. But in December, Senator Ellison issued a warrant for extradition — a decision welcomed by the US Government. Griffiths' extradition in February is believed to be the first out of Australia for a breach of intellectual property law.

"This extradition represents the (US) Department of Justice's commitment to protect intellectual property rights from those who violate our laws from the other side of the globe," US Assistant Attorney-General Alice Fisher said.

But Justice Young described as "bizarre" the fact that "people are being extradited to the US to face criminal charges when they have never been to the US and the alleged act occurred wholly outside the US".

Griffiths appears to have been singled out by US authorities. British-based members of Drink or Die were reportedly tried in Britain. Last month, in news that slipped the local media's radar, Hew Griffiths pleaded guilty in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, to criminal copyright infringement offences. According to US authorities, Griffiths admitted to overseeing all the illegal operations of the now-disbanded Drink Or Die.

On top of a possible 10-year jail term, Griffiths could be fined $US500,000. (By way of comparison, the average sentence for rape in Victoria is six years and 10 months.)

Any Australian who has pirated software worth more than $US1000 could be subject to the same extradition process as Griffiths was. "Should not the Commonwealth Parliament do more to protect Australians from this procedure?" Justice Young asked in his article. Others, however, argue that extradition is necessary to prevent internet crimes that transcend borders.
Griffiths will be sentenced on June 22.

US Immigration Officials Allegedly Drugged Deportees

An ACLU lawyer condemns the incidents in L.A. as 'horrifying.' Both men remain in the U.S. while appealing their cases.

Taken from The LA Times, May 9, 2007
By Anna Gorman and Greg Krikorian

U.S. immigration officials sedated two foreign nationals against their will during failed attempts to deport them in Los Angeles, the men and their attorneys said Tuesday.

Indonesian immigrant Raymond Soeoth, 38, who was appealing his case for political asylum, was sedated with antipsychotic drugs in December 2004 at a San Pedro detention facility; Senegal immigrant Amadou Diouf, 31, also pursuing an appeal for permanent legal status, was medicated in February 2006 while on a commercial plane at Los Angeles International Airport, according to both men and the medical files they said they obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"It's horrifying," said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Ahilan Arulanantham, who represents the two. "It's blatantly illegal. You cannot inject people with psychotropic drugs if they are not mentally ill."

The ACLU, with assistance from the law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson, is investigating the incidents, which were first reported in the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Arulanantham said neither of his clients has been treated for mental illness.

Soeoth and Diouf have been released. Their cases are pending at the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials declined to comment on the cases, but a U.S. Public Health Services official said authorities do sedate immigrants during deportation if they have a psychiatric disorder, are severely agitated during a flight or present a danger to themselves or others.

Dr. Tim Shack, medical director for the Division of Immigration Health Services, said medical escorts, who include nurses and doctors, sedate detainees against their will if they fail to respond to verbal counseling and physical restraints and still present an "imminent risk of danger."

In some cases, the agency gets a court order to administer medication. The drugs are given by escorts who accompany detainees with medical or psychological problems as they are transferred or deported. Medications commonly used are lorazepam, haloperidol, olanzapine and benztropine.

Soeoth, a Chinese Christian, fled Indonesia in 1999 to escape religious persecution. He applied for asylum but lost the case. He later appealed.

On Dec. 7, 2004, Soeoth said, immigration agents told him he was going to be deported. They did not give him a chance to call his attorney or his wife, he said.

An agent asked how he felt and if he wanted medication. Soeoth said he replied that he felt OK and that he didn't want any drugs. But a few hours later, Soeoth said, several agents came into the room where he was being held and told him they had to medicate him. Soeoth said the agents grabbed his arms and legs, pushed him onto a bench, pulled down his pants and injected him in the buttocks.

"Why are they doing this to me?" Soeoth recalled thinking before losing consciousness and being taken to the airport. "I am no animal."

His medical files indicate that Soeoth may have threatened to kill himself, but he said this was not true.

After they got to the airport, airline security officials canceled Soeoth's removal because of a lack of proper notification by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to his medical file.

Diouf came into the country from Senegal on a student visa in 1996 but overstayed because he began dating an American citizen, whom he later married. He was ordered deported but is appealing his case.

The night before his flight, Diouf said, agents told him he was going to be deported. He said he replied that he had a stay of deportation. But the next morning, Diouf said, agents told him he was being sent to his native country.

A medical escort — with a syringe in his pocket — told him they would be on a commercial plane and could not afford to have any problems, he said. Another agent offered to give him pills, he said.

On the plane, Diouf, who was handcuffed, said he told a flight attendant in French that he wanted to speak to the captain so he could tell him about the stay. The medical escort told him he wasn't following orders and took out the syringe and a bottle of water. Diouf said he began yelling as the agents wrestled him to the floor and injected him.

A note in the medical file said that he was not following orders and that he was "taken to the ground on board the aircraft after being given medication."

Diouf said the captain ordered them all off the plane.

"That was a pretty humiliating ordeal," he said. "I don't think I was making trouble. I just wanted to speak to the captain."

Although unaware of the cases until contacted Tuesday, legal experts expressed outrage at the alleged treatment of the two men and practice of sedating deportees.

"It is inappropriate to give these kinds of injections and put people on aircraft in violation of the federal air regulations that prohibit the transport of drugged individuals," said professor Abraham R. Wagner of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "It is not how America's constitutional democracy is supposed to operate in this century."

Another nationally recognized expert on homeland security issues and the law, Paul Finkleman of Albany Law School in New York, was equally harsh in his criticism and discounted the notion that deportees' combativeness or threats of suicide would justify drugging them.

"If you are using anti-psychotic drugs as a means of controlling people who do not need to be controlled, then the medical people are violating their own oaths as physicians and nurses and violating federal law by administering these drugs," he said.

Though data on such cases are hard to come by, Arizona immigration attorney Dan Kowalski said the concern about deportees being drugged has been around for years. Kowalski said the practice is part of a disturbing pattern that immigration officials are using extraordinary — and unnecessary — tactics to deport illegal immigrants who pose no danger.

"Because the subjects are not citizens, they are fair game for abuse and mistreatment," he said.

In the last several years, Denver attorney Sandra Saltrese said, she has had two deportation clients who were allegedly drugged before being sent out of the U.S. In both cases, she said, the men were seeking asylum.

"These men were docile … they were not suicidal," she said.

U.S. Seeks Closing Of Visa Loophole For Britons

Taken from The New York Times, 02 May 2007,
By JANE PERLEZ

Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the thwarted London bomb plot who was sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday, showed the potential for disaffected young men to be lured as terrorists, a threat that British officials said they would have to contend with for a generation.



But the 25-year-old Mr. Khyam, a Briton of Pakistani descent, also personifies a larger and more immediate concern: as a British citizen, he could have entered the United States without a visa, like many of an estimated 800,000 other Britons of Pakistani origin.

American officials, citing the number of terror plots in Britain involving Britons with ties to Pakistan, expressed concern over the visa loophole. In recent months, the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, has opened talks with the government here on how to curb the access of British citizens of Pakistani origin to the United States.

At the moment, the British are resistant, fearing that restrictions on the group of Britons would incur a backlash from a population that has always sided with the Labor Party. The Americans say they are hesitant to push too hard and embarrass their staunch ally in the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair, as he prepares to step down from office.

Among the options that have been put on the table, according to British officials, was the most onerous option to Britain, that of canceling the entire visa waiver program that allows all Britons entry to the United States without a visa. Another option, politically fraught as it is, would be to single out Britons of Pakistani origin, requiring them to make visa applications for the United States.

Rather than impose any visa restrictions, the British government has told Washington it would prefer if the Americans simply deported Britons who failed screening once they arrived at an airport in the United States, British officials said. The British also screen at their end, and share intelligence with the Americans.

But Washington feels strongly, Mr. Chertoff has said, that it has the right to build controls against terrorists from Britain who do not have a prior criminal record — precisely the kind of man Mr. Khyam was until he was arrested in early 2004 and put on trial for plotting to blow up targets like a major London nightclub and a popular suburban shopping mall.

For its part, the British government looks with dismay at the frequency with which Britons travel to their ancestral land of Pakistan — an estimated 400,000 trips a year — where a small minority, like Mr. Khyam, link up with extremist groups and acquire training in weapons and explosives.

Foreign office officials have said they have discussed measures with the Pakistani Embassy in London, which grants Pakistani passports to Britons of Pakistani descent, to consider tightening the rules for Pakistani travel documents.

In Washington, an expert on terrorism and Pakistan, Bruce Riedel, who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton and in the early Bush administration, and who recently retired after 30 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Mr. Khyam was perfect material for Al Qaeda.

“He is the classic U.K.-Pakistani connection that Al Qaeda has focused on since 9/11,” said Mr. Riedel, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “His U.K. passport gives him international mobility. His training at a camp run for Kashmiris by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency gives him expertise. Al Qaeda gives him direction.”

The trial that ended Monday with the conviction of Mr. Khyam and four other Muslim men on conspiracy charges did not establish whether Mr. Khyam or his colleagues belonged to a Qaeda cell.

But the head of counterterrorism at Scotland Yard, Peter Clarke, said after the verdict the investigations into the bomb plot had given “a new understanding of the Al Qaeda threat to Britain.”

At his sentencing, the judge, Sir Michael Astill, described Mr. Khyam as “the energy behind the conspiracy,” the man who attracted other young Muslims to the plan, and inspired them, and who knew how to shuttle from Britain to Pakistan for terrorism training.

From Mr. Khyam’s own testimony, as well as a cascade of official intelligence surveillance presented during the yearlong trial, a portrait of determination and ruthlessness emerged.

As a teenager, Omar became entranced by jihadist ideology. He moved on to the cause of Kashmir, and was then piqued by 9/11 and the Iraq war, things that inspired and angered other Britons with Pakistani roots. But he in the end turned to attacking Britain, where he was born and raised.

Asked on the witness stand his reaction to 9/11, Mr. Khyam did not disguise his delight.

“I was happy,” he recalled in his south England accent. “America was, and still is, the greatest enemy of Islam. I was happy that America had been hit because of what it represented against the Muslims, but obviously 3,000 people died, so there were mixed feelings.”

Mr. Khyam testified that his parents migrated to Britain from Pakistan in the 1970s, before his birth. He came from a family, he said, with a proud heritage of service, first in the British Army in Pakistan, then in the army of the newly independent Pakistan, and also in the intelligence services.

His parents were not particularly religious, he said, a pattern typical among Pakistani immigrants to Britain where the new generation, often turned off by what they see as the loose morals of binge drinking and broken marriages, has proven to be more devout than their elders.

At the age of 10, his father, a successful businessman with a textile factory in Karachi, left his mother and moved to Belgium, leaving behind Omar, the eldest, and two small children.

His mother’s English was poor. Quickly, Omar became the man of the household, organizing the finances, and bossing his siblings. Instead of enrolling in the local school where most of the students were South Asian, he attended a mostly white, government-run school, and led a middle-class British life.

He did relatively well in his final school exams and enrolled in college but, distracted by his larger cause, never followed through on his studies or sought steady employment.

By 1998, he had taken his first steps into the realm of radical Islam, when he was introduced to Al Muhajiroun, a group led in Britain by Omar Bakri Mohammed, in his neighborhood in West Sussex. The group indoctrinates followers in the virtues of an Islamic state and indoctrinates a strict code of personal behavior. It expects members to shun friends who do not practice strict Islamic mores.

On the political side, Mr. Khyam calmly told the court about how he watched bloody videotapes of Russian soldiers blowing up mosques in Chechnya, and of atrocities by the Serbs against Muslims in Bosnia, which were shown to members of Al Muhajiroun.

But he soon tired of Al Muhajiroun, he said, and yearned for something more than the group’s desire for an Islamic state in Britain, which he deemed to be “not realistic.”

He took his first trip to Pakistan as a vacation with his mother and his brothers in 1999, when he was just a teenager. There, he experienced firsthand what he had heard about at home: the cause of Kashmir, the border area claimed by both Pakistan and India. He met with a group, Al Badr Mujahedeen, that fought, he said, to free Kashmir from Indian control.

In early 2000, Mr. Khyam was back in Pakistan. He found a training camp for fighters being sent to Kashmir that was run, he said, by Inter-Services Intelligence.

According to his testimony, the American-led war in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, dramatically colored his views. Those wars, he said, were wars against Islam, and he hoped to join the fight.

“By this time I had a lot of contact with the I.S.I. because of my family,” he said, referring to the Pakistani intelligence service. He visited the headquarters of the agency in Islamabad, and was told that what the Americans wanted “is to stop anyone who calls for the return of an Islamic state or a caliphate.”

From 2002 on, Mr. Khyam said he shuttled between Britain and Pakistan, culminating in a trip in 2003 to a training camp in Malakand in the North-West Frontier Province with five of his fellow defendants, including his younger brother, Shujah, who was acquitted.

By late 2003, according to prosecution evidence, Mr. Khyam had decided from his trips to Pakistan to concentrate on a plot in Britain that would involve a fertilizer bomb.

Mr. Khyam, using some of the organizational skills he had honed as a young man at home, can be heard on surveillance tapes divvying up responsibilities for the plan.

Along the way, he found time to marry — in what he called a “religious marriage” — Saira, a Pakistani woman.

They finally married in a civil ceremony on March 25, 2004, and a few days later, Mr. Khyam was arrested by the police in a bedroom of a Holiday Inn in England while he was on his honeymoon with his wife.

Freedom Delayed For 82 Inmates Cleared At Guantanamo

Taken from Houston Chronicle, April 28, 2007
By CRAIG WHITLOCK (Washington Post)

More than a fifth of the approximately 385 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been cleared for release but might have to wait months or years for their freedom because U.S. officials are finding it increasingly difficult to line up places to send them, Bush administration officials and defense lawyers said.

Since February, the Pentagon has notified about 85 inmates or their attorneys that they are eligible to leave after being cleared by military review panels. But only a handful have gone home.

Eighty-two remain at Guantanamo and face indefinite waits as U.S. officials struggle to figure out when and where to deport them, and under what conditions.

Rejected by homeland
In many cases, the prisoners' countries don't want them back. Yemen has balked at accepting some of the 106 Yemeni nationals at Guantanamo by challenging the legality of their citizenship.

Another major obstacle: U.S. laws that prevent the deportation of people to countries where they could face torture or other human rights abuses, as in the case of 17 Chinese Muslim separatists who have been cleared for release but fear they could be executed for political reasons if returned to China.

Compounding the problem are persistent refusals by the United States, its European allies and other countries to grant asylum to prisoners who are stateless or have no place to go.

"Countries believe this is not their problem. They think they didn't contribute to Guantanamo, and therefore they don't have to be part of the solution," said John Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Algerian forced to wait
A case in point is Ahmed Belbacha, 37, an Algerian from Britain who has been locked up at Guantanamo for five years. The Pentagon has alleged that Belbacha met al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden twice and received weapons training in Afghanistan.

His attorneys say he was rounded up with other innocents in Pakistan in 2002.

On Feb. 22, without explanation, the Pentagon told Belbacha's lawyers in London that he had been approved to leave Guantanamo.

Despite entreaties from the State Department, however, the British government has refused to accept Belbacha and five other immigrants who had lived in the country, because they lack British citizenship.

This month, Clint Williamson, the State Department's ambassador for war crimes, visited Algiers to discuss possible arrangements for the return of two dozen Algerians who remain at Guantanamo, including Belbacha, but no breakthroughs were reported.

In many cases, said Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer who represents Belbacha and several other prisoners who have been cleared, the prisoners and officials in their home countries are willing to approve the transfer, but the delays persist.

"The holdup is a mystery to me, frankly," said Katznelson, senior counsel for Reprieve, a British legal defense fund. "If the U.S. has cleared these people and they want to go back, I don't understand why they can't just put them on a plane."

'Worst of the worst'
Other prisoner advocates said the Bush administration has made its task more difficult by exaggerating the threat posed by most Guantanamo inmates - officials repeatedly called them "the worst of the worst" - and refusing to acknowledge mistaken detentions.

Foreign governments have questioned why U.S. officials should expect other countries to pitch in, given that Washington won't offer asylum to detainees either.

"This is a problem of our own creation, and yet we expect other countries to shoulder the entire burden of a solution," said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

"There needs to be a worldwide solution here. The U.S. has to bear some of that burden. It can't simply expect its partners and allies to absorb all its detainees."

The 82 cleared prisoners who remain stuck in limbo come from 16 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, according to defense attorneys who have received official notification of their clients' status.

The 17 Chinese Muslim separatists make up one of the largest contingents. Other countries with multiple prisoners awaiting release include Afghanistan, Sudan, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

Judicial process moves at glacial pace
The Pentagon has reduced the population at Guantanamo by roughly half since the peak of 680 in May 2003, generally by sending prisoners back to their native countries. But U.S. officials said progress has slowed because of the complexity of the remaining cases.

Of the roughly 385 still incarcerated, U.S. officials said they intend to eventually put 60 to 80 on trial and free the rest. But the judicial process has moved at a glacial pace, largely because of constitutional legal challenges.

Only two people have been charged under a military tribunal system approved by Congress last year. One of those cases has been adjudicated. David Hicks, an Australian citizen, pleaded guilty in March to lending material support to terrorists. He was sentenced to nine months in prison and is scheduled to be transferred to Australia in May to serve his time there.

Defense lawyers for some of the 82 cleared prisoners whose release is pending said Hicks received a better deal than did their clients who were not charged with any offenses. "One of the cruel ironies is that in Guantanamo, you've got to plead guilty to be released," said Wizner, the ACLU attorney. "It's the only way out of there."

Virtually all the prisoners at Guantanamo come from countries that the State Department has cited for records of human rights abuses. Under U.S. rules, a pattern of abuses in a country does not automatically preclude deportation there. Rather, U.S. officials must investigate each case to determine whether an individual is likely to face persecution.

The investigations are time-consuming and often meet with resistance from the prisoners' home countries, which can be sensitive to suggestions that they allow torture, U.S. officials said. In cases where there is a risk of mistreatment, U.S. policy is to obtain a written promise from the host government that the prisoner will not be abused and that U.S. officials will be allowed to monitor the arrangement.

"It often takes us months and months, or even years, to negotiate the human rights assurances that we are comfortable with before we will transfer someone to another country," said Bellinger, the State Department's legal adviser.

Human rights groups have criticized the written assurances as unreliable. In March, the New York-based group Human Rights Watch issued a report on the fate of seven Russians who were released from Guantanamo three years ago, asserting three have been tortured since their return.

The watchdog group urged the U.S. government to find third-party countries willing to take Guantanamo inmates who are judged to be at risk for political persecution. U.S. officials countered that they have tried to do that for years, with virtually no success.

Albania steps in
Only one country has been willing to accept Guantanamo prisoners who had never previously set foot inside its borders. Last year, after prodding by the State Department, the Balkan nation of Albania agreed to take five Chinese separatists who belong to an ethnic group known as Uighurs.

The men were captured in late 2001 after they crossed the Chinese border into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their attorneys said they were mistakenly taken into custody and had not taken up arms against U.S. forces. U.S. officials said dozens of countries refused to grant asylum to the Uighurs for fear of angering China, which considers them terrorists for leading a secession movement in the western province of Turkestan.

Seventeen other Uighurs have been cleared for release but remain in Guantanamo because the State Department has been unable to find a home for them. Human rights groups have pressed the U.S. government to offer the men asylum, to no avail.

A senior U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the Bush administration had considered granting the Uighurs asylum but that the idea was nixed by the Department of Homeland Security. The Uighurs would be rejected under U.S. immigration law, the official said, because they once trained in armed camps and because their separatist front, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, was labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. government in 2002.

Some human rights advocates said the Bush administration could speed things up by asking the United Nations or another international body for help.

U.S. Charges Suspected Bin Laden Driver

Taken from Yahoo News, 10 May 2007

By Associated Press

The United States filed charges of conspiracy and providing support for terrorism Thursday against a Guantanamo detainee accused of working as a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. Salim Ahmed Hamdan is the third Guantanamo detainee to be charged under a new set of rules signed last year by President Bush after the Supreme Court rejected the previous system.

Hamdan, who is from Yemen, has been detained at Guantanamo since May 2002. It was his legal challenge that forced the Bush administration and Congress to draft new rules for the military trials, known as commissions, for the men held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in eastern Cuba.

In the charging documents, the military said Hamdan conspired with bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the terrorist attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

In addition to working as bin Laden's driver and bodyguard, the U.S. said Hamdan transported and delivered weapons to al-Qaida and its associates and trained at terrorist camps.

The documents do not disclose the potential sentence Hamdan could receive in a military trial, but they specify that he would not be subject to the death penalty.

U.S. officials have previously said they expect to charge 60 to 80 of the Guantanamo detainees and may seek the death penalty in some cases.

Infant Mortality In Iraq Soars As Young Pay The Price For War

Taken from the Independent, UK, 08 May 2007
By Andrew Buncombe

Two wars and a decade of sanctions have led to a huge rise in the mortality rate among young children in Iraq, leaving statistics that were once the envy of the Arab world now comparable with those of sub-Saharan Africa.

A new report shows that in the years since 1990, Iraq has seen its child mortality rate soar by 125 per cent, the highest increase of any country in the world. Its rate of deaths of children under five now matches that of Mauritania.

Jeff MacAskey, head of health for the Save the Children charity, which published the report, said: "Iraq, Botswana and Zimbabwe all have different reasons for making the least amount of progress on child mortality. Whether it's the impact of war, HIV/Aids or poverty the consequences are equally devastating. Yet other countries such as Malawi and Nepal have shown that despite conflict and poverty child mortality rates can be reversed."

Figures collated by the charity show that in 1990 Iraq's mortality rate for under-fives was 50 per 1,000 live births. In 2005 it was 125. While many other countries have higher rates - Angola, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, all have rates above 200 - the increase in Iraq is higher than elsewhere.

Egypt, Indonesia and Bangladesh have made the most progress in tackling child mortality, while Iraq, Botswana and Zimbawe have regressed the most.

Sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime were imposed by the UN in 1990 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and remained in place until after the coalition invasion in 2003. The sanctions, encouraged by the US as a means to topple Saddam, were some of the most comprehensive ever put in place and had a devastating effect on Iraq's infrastructure and health services.

Precisely how many children died because of sanctions is unknown but a report in 1999 from the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef), suggested that between 1991 and 1998 an additional 500,000 died.

Denis Halliday, who resigned as the UN's humanitarian coordinator in protest at the sanctions, said at the time: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."

Kathy Kelly, an anti-war campaigner with Voices in the Wilderness, said last night: "The punishment of children through the economic and military war against Iraq has been the greatest scandal."

Save the Children's report, State of the World's Mothers 2007, found the majority of child deaths occur in just 10 countries - either those with large populations such as India and China, or those with sparse health services such as Afghanistan and Angola. Aids remains one the central factors affecting mortality rates.

"More than 10 million children under age five still die each year. That's almost 28,000 a day, almost all in developing countries," said the charity's US president, Charles MacCormack.

"Vaccines, oral rehydration therapy and insecticide-treated mosquito nets are not expensive. Yet, sadly, many mothers and children lack access to these life-saving measures."

The 10 worst countries
Nine of the 10 countries with the worst infant mortality rates are in sub-Saharan Africa. The other one is Afghanistan, which has the second-worst rate.

1. Sierra Leone: 282 (per 1,000 live births)
2. Afghanistan: 257
3. Niger: 256
4. Liberia: 235
5. Somalia: 225
6. Mali: 218
7. Chad: 208
8= Democratic Republic of Congo: 205
8= Equatorial Guinea: 205
10. Rwanda: 203

Iraq Rebuilding 'Is Failing'

Taken from Al-Jazeera News Agency, APRIL 30, 2007
By Tom Ackerman

A US audit has found many of Iraq's reconstruction projects are falling apart and oil production is still below pre-war levels.However, Washington said it was Iraq's responsibility to maintain its infrastructure.The report describes widespread waste, decay and deterioration.



Inspectors said measures to keep rebuilt infrastructure operating were not carried out by the Iraqis. Problems were found complying with international standards and construction sites did not meet safety objectives.

The report also said that electricity supply in Baghdad was down to less than seven hours a day on average, and only 15 out of 142 planned health care centres had been completed.

At Baghdad airport, it said, 10 out of 17 new generators were no longer working because they had not been maintained properly.

Corruption
The sewer system at Erbil's modernised paediatric hospital leaks, medical waste clogged drains, and a new incinerator was not being used.

And after the renovation of Iraq's civil defence headquarters, there was evidence of water damage and wiring that posed a risk of electrical fires. In its official response to the findings, the Pentagon said once the projects were transferred to Iraqis the US gave up control and authority over them.

The report also criticised the Iraqi government's efforts to combat corruption, which costs at least $5bn a year.

It found that Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, had blocked 48 corruption investigations involving 102 people.

Iraq War Strain Leads Troops To Abuse Civilians, Survey Shows

Recently unclassified documents suggest that senior officers viewed the killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in late 2005 as a potential public relations problem that could fuel insurgent propaganda against the US military, leading investigators to question whether the officers' immediate response had been intentionally misleading. Colonel R. Gary Sokoloski, a lawyer who served as chief of staff to Major General Richard A. Huck, the division commander, approved a news release about the killings that investigators interviewing him in March 2006 suggested was "intentionally inaccurate" because it stated, contrary to the facts at hand, that the civilians had been killed by an insurgent's bomb. Four officers were charged with failing to properly investigate the civilian killings. The first hearing against one of the officers, Captain Randy W. Stone, is set for Tuesday morning, in a military courtroom at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Three enlisted Marines are charged with the killings.

If you thought that this was horrific and a “one off” then wait till you read this news-piece...

Taken from The Guardian, UK, May 5, 2007
By Ewen MacAskill

One in 10 of the US soldiers in Iraq mistreats civilians or damages their property, according to a survey published by the Pentagon last night. The report said the mental health of soldiers and marines deteriorated significantly as a result of extended or multiple deployments.

The study confirms the extent to which the US military is being strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The survey into the mental health of the soldiers and marines was requested by US commanders in Iraq and carried out by the office of the surgeon-general in August and October, with 1,300 soldiers and 450 marines interviewed.

The report says: "Approximately 10% of soldiers and marines report mistreating non-combatants (damaged/destroyed Iraqi property when not necessary or hit/kicked a non-combatant when not necessary).

"Soldiers that have high levels of anger, experienced high levels of combat, or screened positive for a mental health problem were nearly twice as likely to mistreat non-combatants as those who had low levels of anger or combat or screened negative for a mental health problem."

The report also found that fewer than half of all soldiers and marines would report a team member for unethical behaviour, and more than one-third believed torture should be allowed to save the life of a fellow soldier or marine.

There are about 150,000 US troops in Iraq. Many have been complaining in emails and blogs about President George Bush's decision this year to extend deployment from one year to 15 months as part of an attempt to pacify Baghdad and Anbar province.

The Pentagon this week imposed restrictions on internet postings from war zones, and claimed it was because of the risk of providing sensitive information to insurgents.

Blogs and emails from troops in the field can often be extraordinarily vivid and indiscreet.

One report last weekend from a soldier in Iraq advised a trooper in the US who was about to deploy in Iraq on ways to watch for and detect explosive devices planted by insurgents.

Reacting to the ban, soldiers said that the real reason for the curb was their negative comments about the war, including scepticism about Mr Bush's claims about progress.

Soldiers in the field and former soldiers, in blogs posted on sites such as Black Five, an unofficial site run by former paratrooper Matthew Burden, said the regulations would be inoperable, with most troops obeying the rules but dissidents finding ways round the ban.

Mr Burden, editor of The Blog of War, a book pulling together accounts from the field, criticised the decision: "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone.

This is the best PR the military has - its most honest voice out of the war zone.

"And it's being silenced."

Israel Accused Of Prisoner Abuse

Taken from The BBC, 6 May 2007
By Tim Franks

Human rights groups in Israel have accused the security services of routinely mistreating Palestinian detainees.

The two groups said detainees were held in appalling conditions, and were sometimes tortured. They said the maltreatment was intended to "break the spirit" of those who were being interrogated.



Israel's justice ministry rejected the report - which was published on Sunday - as unrepresentative and inaccurate.

The report lists a number of techniques the two groups, B'Tselem and the HaMoked Centre for the Defence of the Individual, say are deployed by the Israeli Security Agency.

They range from preventing detainees from contacting their lawyers, to painful shackling to a chair, threats and intimidation, beating and sleep deprivation.

The groups drew on the testimony of 73 Palestinians detained over a six-month period.

International law
International law is clear in prohibiting ill-treatment or torture, and it allows for no extenuating circumstances.

However, the human rights groups point to a more ambiguous ruling from the Israeli High Court.

It decreed that members of the security service who abused detainees may be exempted from criminal liability, if they believed that the people they were interrogating had information about an imminent terrorist act.

The human rights campaigners also say that of more than 500 complaints about the behaviour of security service agents, not one criminal investigation has been opened.

The Ministry of Justice said the report was "fraught with mistakes, groundless claims and inaccuracies".

In a statement, the ministry also said that over the past few years, information obtained by security service agents - sometimes through interrogation - had saved the lives of many civilians.

7/7 Leader: More Evidence Reveals What Police Knew

Taken from The Guardian, UK, May 3, 2007
By Vikram Dodd, Ian Cobain and Helen Carter

Police were investigating the ringleader of the July 7 bombings just five months before he led the suicide attacks on London that killed 52 people, the Guardian has learned.

In what appears to have been a renewed investigation, a witness gave detectives in January 2005 part of Mohammad Sidique Khan's name, his mobile telephone number and the name and the address of his mother-in-law. The revelation suggests Khan was being investigated much nearer to the London bombings than has been officially admitted.

Shahzad Tanweer (l), Germaine Lindsay and Mohammed Sidique Khan (r) enter Luton Train Station at 8.10am on June 28. Photograph: Metropolitan police

Details of how Khan and a second bomber, Shehzad Tanweer, came repeatedly under surveillance in 2004 were disclosed this week after five of their associates were jailed for life for planning attacks around south-east England.

The discovery that Khan was reinvestigated the following year appears to contradict claims from MI5 that inquiries about him came to an end in 2004 after it was decided that other terrorism suspects warranted more urgent investigation. It is also likely to lead to scrutiny of MI5's assertion that its officers, who had followed, photographed and secretly recorded Khan, and made other inquiries about him, did not know who he was.

The Guardian has learned that on January 27 2005, police took a statement from the manager of a garage in Leeds which had loaned Khan a courtesy car while his vehicle was being repaired. MI5 had followed Khan and Tanweer as they drove the courtesy car across London in March the previous year. The garage manager told police that the car had been loaned to a "Mr S Khan" who gave his mobile telephone number and an address in Gregory Street, Batley, West Yorkshire.

Khan, the police were told, had asked for his repaired car to be delivered to another address, in nearby Dewsbury, which is now known to be his mother-in-law's home. Almost a year earlier, MI5 officers had followed Khan to the same address after watching him meet a number of suspected terrorists.

That was not the end of police interest in Khan in 2005. On the afternoon of February 3 an officer from Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism branch carried out inquiries with the company which had insured a car in which Khan was seen driving almost a year earlier. He discovered that Khan had insured a five-door silver Honda Accord saloon, in his own name. Inquiries also showed that the car was registered in the name of Khan's mother-in-law.

Nothing about these inquiries appeared in the report by parliament's intelligence and security committee after it investigated the July 7 attacks. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, said: "It is becoming more and more clear that the story presented to the public and parliament is at odds with the facts."

Scotland Yard described the 2005 inquiries as "routine", while security sources said they were related to the fertiliser bomb plot.

In the Commons yesterday, Tony Blair said an independent inquiry would "undermine support" for the security service. David Cameron said only a full inquiry would "get to the truth".

There was more confusion yesterday over evidence that Shehzad Tanweer was surfing the internet for bomb-making tips in June 2005, two weeks before the suicide attacks. According to a document which prosecution lawyers in the fertiliser bomb plot case disclosed to the defence before the trial began, Tanweer was heard to be discussing bombings and using the internet to make such a bomb.

The document says: "Tanweer told the same person he had entered Afghanistan and met people from around the world who had got into his head." MI5 says this information is "false".

But the Crown Prosecution Service told the Guardian the information was passed to it by Scotland Yard. The Yard does not deny this but says its officers in the case had "no recollection" of the information.

After The War In Lebanon... The Battle For Israel

The struggle for a nation engulfed by the aftershocks of a bungled war

Taken from The Independent, UK, 03 May 2007
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

The struggle for control of an Israeli government gripped by aftershocks from the failures of last year's bloody Lebanon war began in earnest last night after Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister, called on the Prime Minister to resign.

Ms Livni became the first senior figure in the cabinet - and in Ehud Olmert's own party, Kadima - to announce that she had told the Prime Minister face to face that he should quit in response to the official report highlighting the failures of the war.

Ms Livni, who made no secret of her desire to replace Mr Olmert, declared after a tense hour-long meeting with the Prime Minister: "I told him that resignation would be the right thing for him to do. It's not a personal matter between me and the Prime Minister - this issue is more important than both of us."

Her announcement, which was delivered to reporters after the meeting in a notably low-key fashion and which stopped significantly short of a "you go or I will" ultimatum, was widely interpreted as an effort to accelerate the pace of an internal party revolt against Mr Olmert's 13-month premiership.

Mr Olmert was standing firm after the meeting last night and one of his senior aides suggested that he would have no alternative but to sack Ms Livni after her decision not to underpin her call to Mr Olmert by resigning herself.

A spokesman quoted him as telling an emergency meeting of Kadima Knesset members: "I intend to implement the recommendations of the [war] report down to the last detail. I am in a personally uncomfortable position, but I will not shirk my responsibility and will fix all the mistakes."

The stand-off marked a new climax in the struggle to contain the political fallout left by the failure - despite the inexorably mounting death toll - of the initially popular 34-day war in the summer to achieve either of its main objectives. They were the defeat of Hizbollah and the return of the two Israeli soldiers whose abduction by the guerrilla group on 12 July triggered the conflict.

The 48-year-old Foreign Minister is the most popular politician in her party and emerged unscathed from the Winograd inquiry into the war - unlike Mr Olmert and Amir Peretz, his Defence Minister, who was reportedly considering resigning from the government last night.

While Ms Livni's intervention after two days of ominous silence following the report's release marked an escalation of the turmoil in Israeli politics, it was not yet clear that she can be confident of commanding a broad-based coalition, which currently stretches from the Labour party, of which Mr Peretz is leader, to the hard-right Yisrael Beiteinu Party, and the ultra-orthodox Shas.

Some analysts were suggesting that the octogenarian former prime minister Shimon Peres could emerge as a transitional leader if Mr Olmert bows to pressure from the public to resign. A recent poll found that 65 per cent want him to quit in response to Winograd.

While the Winograd report vindicates Ms Livni's early call for a negotiated exit from a war which in the end cost more than 1,000 Lebanese and 150 Israeli lives, it also underlines the problems posed by a Prime Minister and Defence Minister with no top-level military experience - a supposed defect which several politicians and analysts believe could also count against Ms Livni.

While Tal Zilberstein, a strategic adviser to Mr Olmert, said the Prime Minister had "no choice" but to fire Ms Livni, Mr Olmert may yet face a dilemma over whether to do so. By staying in the cabinet, Ms Livni, as the senior deputy, would automatically become acting Prime Minister pending a leadership contest - thus ensuring she fought an election as an incumbent. If she is outside the cabinet then Mr Peres would take over in the same way.

On the other hand to sack her, according to Professor Yoram Peri, a leading Tel Aviv University analyst, might mean "an open war between Mr Olmert and Ms Livni and her supporters", which he said could further damage Mr Olmert as well as their party's currently flagging poll ratings.

And if the sacking were to take place before the end of today it could even tempt Ms Livni to become the star attraction at the opposition anti-Olmert demonstration planned for this evening in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square - although Professor Peri predicted last night that she would not attend whether sacked or not.

The scale of the demonstration is considered one of several crucial factors in determining Mr Olmert's chances of survival.

Ms Livni said she did not want a general election - in which the current polls suggest the party would trail behind the hard-right opposition Likud Party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu - but instead saw a leadership primary contest within Kadima as the means of choosing Mr Olmert's successor.

She said: "Kadima needs to choose its leadership in a democratic manner, in a primary, and when the time comes I plan to submit my candidacy. Now is the time to restore the public's trust in the government."

Ms Livni defended her decision not to resign from the cabinet by indicating that she wanted to work to implement the Winograd recommendations - particularly its call for the Foreign Ministry to be brought more fully into strategic security decisions.

She said the Foreign Ministry - which was widely reported to have urged a much swifter diplomatic process to end the war than actually took place - was sidelined by the Prime Minister. "Co-operation between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister is not a personal, but a critical matter. It is no secret that during the war there was no co-operation of the kind," she said. "The commission ruled that the responsibility for the lack of co-operation falls on the Prime Minister."

Professor Peri said that Ms Livni may have lost "some ground" by treading a difficult path between openly delivering an ultimatum and doing nothing to harm Mr Olmert. Citing what he said was traditionally "almost a taboo" against an overt strike to oust a party leader in Israeli politics, he said: "She is trying to force [Mr Olmert] to resign without being blamed for it. That is the essence of it."

Many commentators and politicians anyway doubt Mr Olmert's ability to survive beyond July and August, which is expected to see not only the anniversary of the war in Lebanon but also the publication of the final Winograd report.

Among other things, the final report will deal with the bitterly controversial decision to prolong and expand the invasion - with the loss of 34 Israeli soldiers alone during the weekend after the UN peace deal was agreed in New York.

Israel's year of war and scandal
January 2006: Ariel Sharon suffers a stroke and remains in a coma.
12 July 2006: Israeli cabinet votes to wage war in Lebanon after Hizbollah fighters cross into Israel, killing eight soldiers and capturing two others.
13 July 2006: Israel launches air strikes on Beirut's international airport.
August 2006: The Justice Minister, Haim Ramon, resigns over charges of sexually harassing a female soldier.
14 August 2006: Truce between Israel and Hizbollah after 34 days of fighting and the deaths of about 1,000 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 159 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
October 2006: Ehud Olmert under police investigation for alleged bribe taking in a major bank privatisation deal when he was the acting finance minister.
January 2007: Israel Defence Forces Chief-of-Staff, Dan Halutz, steps down after inquiry into Lebanon war.
January 2007: Shula Zaken, Mr Olmert's personal secretary, investigated by police over alleged bribe-taking. She has not been charged.
January 2007: President Moshe Katsav takes leave of absence after prosecutors say they intend to charge him with rape and other sexual offences.
25 April 2007: Mr Olmert accused of procuring investment opportunities for an associate while he was trade and industry minister, starting in 2003.
30 April 2007: Winograd commission releases scathing report on Israeli government's conduct in the war in Lebanon.

Around Globe, Walls Spring Up To Divide Neighbors

President Bush vetoed legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq tonight in a historic showdown with Congress over whether the unpopular and costly war should end or escalate. It was a day of high political drama, falling on the fourth anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech declaring that major combat operations had ended in Iraq. Bush rejected legislation pushed by Democratic leaders that would require the first U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn by Oct. 1 with a goal of a complete pullout six months later. Democrats accused Bush of ignoring Americans' desire to stop the war, which has claimed the lives of more than 3,350 members of the military. On the same day Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claimed "considerable progress" in the global fight against terrorism as she prepared to ask skeptical Arab governments to do more and to underwrite democracy in Iraq. Building Walls is the answer by countries fighting the war on terror rather than building relationships...

Taken from Yahoo News, 30.04.07
By Bernd Debusmann, Reuters

What do Tijuana, Baghdad and Jerusalem have in common?

They all have walls that divide neighbors, cause controversy and form part of an array of physical barriers around the world that dwarf the late, unlamented Iron Curtain.



There are walls, fences, trenches and berms. Some are reinforced by motion detectors, heat-sensing cameras, X-ray systems, night-vision equipment, helicopters, drones and blimps. Some are still under construction, some in the planning stage.

When completed, the barriers will run thousands of miles, in places as far apart as Mexico and India, Afghanistan and Spain, Morocco and Thailand, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

They are meant to keep job-hungry immigrants, terrorists and smugglers out, thwart invaders, and keep antagonists apart.

Their proponents cite the proverb "Good fences make good neighbors" but critics say they are a paradoxical result of globalization in so far as goods and capital can move freely but migrants cannot.

By an irony of history, the United States -- the country that hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 -- has emerged as a champion wall builder.

The latest wall to divide city neighborhoods went up in Baghdad in April, built by American soldiers using 12-foot (3.7-metre) high grey concrete slabs weighing more than six metric tons each. The 3-mile-long construction separates a Sunni Muslim district from a Shi'ite area.

It provoked protests from both communities and Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr termed it "racist."

The wall that snakes through Jerusalem to seal off the eastern (Arab) part of the ancient city from the West Bank is of similar construction and inspires similar charges.

In contrast, the people of the Mexican border city of Tijuana have become resigned to the wall of thick, rusty corrugated metal that runs from the surf of the Pacific beach up and down the California hills, separating them from the U.S. city of San Diego. (The official border crossing is the world's busiest -- around 17 million cars and 50 million people a year.)

Further inland, the wall turns into a 17-foot (5-meter) fence, with metal mesh so fine prospective climbers cannot get their fingers through, and an overhanging portion to make scaling even more difficult. It stretches east for 14 miles.

ARE WALLS EFFECTIVE?
The United States is planning to build a 700-mile double-layered fence along part of its 2,000-mile border with Mexico under the 2006 Secure Fence Act. Proponents point to Tijuana and argue that physical barriers are effective in keeping unwanted foreigners out.

Since the attacks on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, anti-immigrant groups in the United Sates have linked illegal immigration with security concerns, and political pressure for tighter border controls grew exponentially.

The Tijuana wall stopped the "banzai runs" of groups of up to 50 illegal crossers who swarmed past border guards in the knowledge that at least some would get past. Before the wall was built, arrests totaled around half a million a year, and have steadily dropped to around 130,000 last year.

But opponents of walling off the United States point to the unintended consequences: a booming industry in building tunnels under the wall (the longest to date, almost half a mile, was discovered in San Diego last year) and in forging identity documents.

And as would-be crossers detoured around the fence and trekked across the Arizona desert instead, the death toll rose steadily, to an average of nine a week.

Latin American politicians in general and Mexicans in particular see the border wall as an affront, and a departure from the philosophy that prompted then President Ronald Reagan, standing before Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, to challenge his Soviet counterpart to "open this gate ... tear down this wall."

Two years later, the wall fell, and, not much later, so did what remained of the Iron Curtain, the lethal system of walls, fences and minefields that sliced 2,500 miles through Europe and divided countries under communist rule from capitalist democracies.

Many of the ruses used when the Iron Curtain was still up -- hollowed out hiding spaces in cars, tunnels, hook ladders -- are still used now. Then, successful crossers were hailed as heroes of freedom. Now they are seen as a threat or a burden.

WALLS TO CEMENT TERRITORIAL CLAIMS
While security and immigration control are the most frequently cited reasons for building border walls, politics play a key role in some countries. In others, fortifications serve to translate territorial claims into concrete facts on the ground.

That applies to one of the least known but longest border barriers of modern times, built by Morocco in the 1980s to curb attacks by the Western Sahara independent movement, Polisario, on territory it claims for itself.

It lies behind a set of walls some 1,700 miles long and 10 feet high made of earth, rock and sand built in the 1980s.

The wall is defended by thousands of Moroccan troops and fortified by bunkers and fences, barbed wire and landmines -- between 200,000 and several million of them, depending on who does the estimating.

To hear Palestinians and United Nations officials tell it, the grey concrete wall that splits Jerusalem from the West Bank and the fences and trenches that run through the West Bank have as much to do with Israeli expansionism as with the stated, and largely successful, purpose of keeping suicide bombers out of Israel.

The West Bank berms, barriers and fences are almost twice as long as Israel's internationally recognized borders and run in a way that make major Jewish settlements in the West Bank a part of Israel.

Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank, as well as foreign critics such as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, talk of "apartheid walls."

Israel's wall has been a persistent target of Arab criticism but Arab countries have built or are building walls themselves.

Saudi Arabia has quietly invited bids for a 550-mile high-tech fence -- complete with sensors, night vision cameras, face-recognition software, barbed wire -- to seal off its border with Iraq.

CONTAINING IRAQ CHAOS
According to U.S. defense contractor sources, the project will cost several billion dollars and was prompted by fears that growing anarchy and unrest in Iraq will spill into Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis stopped work on a barrier along their border with Yemen -- made up largely of huge pipelines filled with concrete -- after Yemeni complaints three years ago.

Another neighbor of Iraq, Kuwait, has already sealed its border with electrified fences, berms and a two-meter deep trench running along the 135-mile (217-kilometer) dividing line, according to a senior Kuwaiti diplomat in Washington.

There is constant aerial surveillance of the line, across which Iraqi tanks rolled in the 1991 invasion of Kuwait.

East of the Arabian Peninsula, ambitious projects are underway to control movement between India and Pakistan; India and Bangladesh; and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Almost invariably, governments that decide on physical separation from a neighbor predict that it would reduce tension but, at times, that remains wishful thinking.

In April, for example, a firefight broke out between Afghan and Pakistani troops after the Afghans tried to tear down parts of a fence running through a tribal area.

Pakistan started building a fence along part of the 1,500-mile (2,500-kilometer) border under U.S. pressure to close the routes of Taliban fighters heading to Afghanistan to join the war against U.S. and multinational forces.

In Europe, two of the most infamous walls -- the remnants of the Berlin wall and the "Peace Wall" in Belfast -- have become tourist attractions. But Spain has built double fences 10 to 20 feet high and topped with razor wire around its wealthy enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco to keep immigrants out.

The fences have had an effect similar to the walls on the border between the United States and Mexico: would-be immigrants from poor countries looked for other ways to reach a rich country.

Stepped-up Spanish coastal patrols and better radar systems prompted African migrants to make riskier voyages to the Spanish-owned Canary Islands. Hundreds have drowned.

If history is a guide, no border fortification can seal off a country entirely. Even the mother of all walls, the Great Wall of China, at around 4,000 miles the longest border wall ever built, failed to keep out the northern barbarians against whom it was meant to protect.

(Additional reporting by Robert Birsel and Simon Cameron-Moore in Islamabad, Kamil Zaheer in New Delhi, Tom Pfeiffer in Rabat, Sheikh Mushtaq in Srinagar, Daniela Deasantis in Paraguay and Tim Gaynor in Phoenix)

Warnings On Student Lenders Unheeded

Bush Aides Derailed New Rules in 2001

Taken from The Washington Post, May 1, 2007; A01
By Amit R. Paley

The Bush administration killed a proposal to clamp down on the student loan industry six years ago following allegations that companies sought to shower universities with financial favors to help generate business, according to documents and interviews with government officials.

The proposed policy, which Education Department officials drafted near the end of the Clinton presidency and circulated at the start of the Bush administration, represented an early, significant but ultimately abortive government response to a problem that this year has grown into a major controversy.

Now, as the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry faces an array of investigations into questionable business practices that some officials believe could have been curtailed by the 2001 proposal, the Education Department has embarked on a new effort to set rules for the industry to prevent conflicts of interest and other abuses. If approved, the rules would be implemented in summer 2008, a few months before Bush leaves the White House.

The abandonment of the 2001 proposal underscores what some consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers believe is lax federal oversight of the financial aid system by a department they say is too cozy with the industry. More than a dozen senior department officials either previously worked in the student loan business or found high-paying jobs in the sector after they left the agency.

"The Department of Education has been run as a wholly owned subsidiary of the loan industry under this administration," said Barmak Nassirian, a longtime advocate for industry reform at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "They are running the federal loan program for the profit of their friends and not for the benefit of students and taxpayers."

Chad Colby, a department spokesman, said he was not aware of the 2001 proposal but noted that a task force was created last week to consider new rules. The department also defended its hiring of loan industry veterans, saying their expertise was invaluable, and pointed to a 2005 decision by the Government Accountability Office to remove federal student financial aid from a list of "high-risk" programs.

"The U.S. Department of Education takes its role as steward of federal financial aid very seriously," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who took office in 2005, said in a statement last week.

No one has been charged with any crime in the investigations led by the New York state attorney general's office and other agencies, but in recent weeks there have been a series of revelations about conflicts of interest and financial links among universities, lenders and government officials. Some Bush administration appointees have said they were unaware of the extent of these controversial practices.

But the 2001 policy draft shows that Education Department officials knew of the issue and that at least some saw a need to act. In addition, some industry executives had sought guidelines on what would qualify as prohibited payments, or "inducements," from lenders to financial aid directors, according to current and former department officials. Several of them spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

"We have been asked to provide guidance on whether certain practices of [private] lenders and guaranty agencies are considered to be prohibited inducements," according to the 2001 draft obtained by The Washington Post. "We are particularly concerned with allegations that some lenders and guaranty agencies have attempted to hide or disguise an impermissible offer."
Such allegations began to draw increasing attention from the department as early as 1999, according to officials.

Although investigators have found several cases in which lenders made payments to schools that steered business their way, it has not been established that those practices violate federal prohibitions on quid pro quo arrangements. The 2001 proposal addressed that challenge by saying the department would presume that a violation has occurred if a lender offers "something of value" to a school at which it has at least 20 percent of the school's loan volume.

The draft policy, known as "subregulatory guidance," was outlined in a letter by John Reeves, a Clinton-era appointee who served as general manager in a unit of the Office of Federal Student Aid and stayed on for part of the Bush administration. The office's chief operating officer, Greg Woods, another Clinton-era appointee, briefed industry groups on the proposal, according to two people who met with him. But Bush appointees quashed the rules.

"We were like, 'No, we're not going to drop a bomb on the lending community with these wacko ideas,' " said Jeffrey R. Andrade, a senior Education Department official at the time who now works for a loan company.

Reeves declined to be interviewed yesterday; Woods died after leaving the government.

Not everyone agrees that the rules would have had a significant impact.

"People who wanted to work around the rules would have found loopholes, unfortunately," said John Dean, special counsel to the Consumer Bankers Association, which represents lenders and took no position on the proposal.

But Andrade, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Postsecondary Education, said the 2001 proposal was "very draconian," so much so that half the schools in the country would have been found in violation of the policy. The department decided to encourage the financial aid community to draft its own voluntary standards, an effort that ultimately collapsed.

It wasn't long before the department's inspector general issued the first of several reports criticizing a lack of oversight from the agency's Office of Federal Student Aid. A 2003 report to Sally L. Stroup, then assistant secretary for postsecondary education and a former lending agency executive, said the office "has never performed reviews of lenders for the specific purpose of reviewing compliance" with federal anti-inducement rules.

A 2006 audit sent to Theresa S. Shaw, the office's chief operating officer and a former Sallie Mae executive, said the agency's unit responsible for overseeing the lending industry "did not provide adequate oversight and consistently enforce" federal rules. Instead, the audit said, the division "emphasized partnership over compliance in dealing with guaranty agencies, lenders, and servicers."

Stroup said the department had considered issuing new anti-inducement rules in 2005, but agency lawyers objected, saying they would not be enforceable if they weren't made through a formal process. The agency decided to postpone the start of that process until last year.

"Of course, in hindsight, that wasn't such a great decision," said Stroup, now a top Republican aide on the House education committee.

The formal process that began last year considered rules similar to the 2001 proposal, but it broke down last month. Spellings then formed a task force to propose rules to take effect next summer.

Congressional Democrats and the department also are now investigating potential conflicts of interest among agency employees. One official, Matteo Fontana, a former Sallie Mae employee, was suspended early last month after revelations that he held more than $100,000 of stock in a student loan company while overseeing the industry.

Most Katrina Aid From Overseas Went Unclaimed

Taken from The Washington Post, April 29, 2007; A01
By John Solomon and Spencer S. Hsu

As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide.

Titled "Echo-Chamber Message" -- a public relations term for talking points designed to be repeated again and again -- the Sept. 7, 2005, directive was unmistakable: Assure the scores of countries that had pledged or donated aid at the height of the disaster that their largesse had provided Americans "practical help and moral support" and "highlight the concrete benefits hurricane victims are receiving."

Many of the U.S. diplomats who received the message, however, were beginning to witness a more embarrassing reality. They knew the U.S. government was turning down many allies' offers of manpower, supplies and expertise worth untold millions of dollars. Eventually the United States also would fail to collect most of the unprecedented outpouring of international cash assistance for Katrina's victims.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

In addition, valuable supplies and services -- such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships -- were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them. In some cases, supplies were wasted.

The struggle to apply foreign aid in the aftermath of the hurricane, which has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $125 billion so far, is another reminder of the federal government's difficulty leading the recovery. Reports of government waste and delays or denials of assistance have surfaced repeatedly since hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck in 2005.

Administration officials acknowledged in February 2006 that they were ill prepared to coordinate and distribute foreign aid and that only about half the $126 million received had been put to use. Now, 20 months after Katrina, newly released documents and interviews make clear the magnitude of the troubles.

More than 10,000 pages of cables, telegraphs and e-mails from U.S. diplomats around the globe -- released piecemeal since last fall under the Freedom of Information Act -- provide a fuller account of problems that, at times, mystified generous allies and left U.S. representatives at a loss for an explanation. The documents were obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a public interest group, which provided them to The Washington Post.

In one exchange, State Department officials anguished over whether to tell Italy that its shipments of medicine, gauze and other medical supplies spoiled in the elements for weeks after Katrina's landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, and were destroyed. "Tell them we blew it," one disgusted official wrote. But she hedged: "The flip side is just to dispose of it and not come clean. I could be persuaded."

In another instance, the Department of Homeland Security accepted an offer from Greece on Sept. 3, 2005, to dispatch two cruise ships that could be used free as hotels or hospitals for displaced residents. The deal was rescinded Sept. 15 after it became clear a ship would not arrive before Oct. 10. The U.S. eventually paid $249 million to use Carnival Cruise Lines vessels.

And while television sets worldwide showed images of New Orleans residents begging to be rescued from rooftops as floodwaters rose, U.S. officials turned down countless offers of allied troops and search-and-rescue teams. The most common responses: "sent letter of thanks" and "will keep offer on hand," the new documents show.

Overall, the United States declined 54 of 77 recorded aid offers from three of its staunchest allies: Canada, Britain and Israel, according to a 40-page State Department table of the offers that had been received as of January 2006.

"There is a lack of accountability in where the money comes in and where it goes," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the public interest group, which called for an investigation into the fate of foreign aid offers. She added: "It's clear that they're trying to hide their ineptitude, incompetence and malfeasance."

In a statement, State Department spokesman Tom Casey said that the U.S. government sincerely appreciated support from around the world and that Katrina had proved to be "a unique event in many ways."

"As we continue our planning for the future, we will draw on the lessons learned from this experience to ensure that we make the best use of any possible foreign assistance that might be offered," Casey said.

Representatives of foreign countries declined to criticize the U.S. response to their aid offers, though some redirected their gifts.

Of $454 million in cash that was pledged by more than 150 countries and foreign organizations, only $126 million from 40 donors was actually received. The biggest gifts were from the United Arab Emirates, $100 million; China and Bahrain, $5 million each; South Korea, $3.8 million; and Taiwan, $2 million.

Bader Bin Saeed, spokesman for the Emirates Embassy in Washington, said that in future disasters, "the UAE would not hesitate to help other countries, whether the U.S. or any other state, in humanitarian efforts."

Kuwait, which made the largest offer, pledged $100 million in cash and $400 million in oil. But the Kuwaitis eventually gave their money to two private groups: $25 million to the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, a project of the former presidents, and another $25 million to the American Red Cross in February 2006. They still plan to contribute another $50 million, said the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Salem Abdullah al-Jaber al-Sabah.

"It was based on my government's assessment of the fastest way to get money to the people that needed it," he said. "The Red Cross was on the ground and action-oriented."

In the White House's February 2006 Katrina report, U.S. officials said Kuwait's $400 million oil donation was to be sold for cash. Sabah said it was an in-kind pledge made when it appeared that U.S. refining capacity was devastated and that the American public would need fuel.

"We have to see what we have to do with that. When you pledge something in-kind, your intention is to give it in-kind. I do not think now the American people are in need of $400 million of fuel and fuel products," he said.

Of the $126 million in cash that has been received, most has not yet been used. More than $60 million was set aside in March 2006 to rebuild schools, colleges and universities, but so far, only $10.4 million has been taken by schools.

Half the $60 million was awarded last fall to 14 Louisiana and Mississippi colleges, but five have not started to claim the money. Only Dillard University in Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College have tapped their full awards, worth $6 million, U.S. Education Department officials said Friday.

Another $30 million was sent to Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes in Louisiana and to the state-run Recovery School District in New Orleans to build libraries, laboratories and other facilities for 130 public schools.

But none of that money has been used yet, said Meg Casper, spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Education. Allocations were just approved by the state board last week, she said, "so the money should start to flow."

The first concrete program officials announced in October 2005 -- a $66 million contract to a consortium of 10 faith-based and charity groups to provide social services to displaced families -- so far has assisted less than half the 100,000 victims it promised to help, the project director said.

The group, led by the United Methodist Committee on Relief, has spent $30 million of the money it was given to aid about 45,000 evacuees. Senate investigators are questioning some terms in the contract proposal, including a provision to pay consultants for 450 days to train volunteers for the work the committee was paid to do.

Jim Cox, the program director, said that the project is "right on track" but that its strategy of relying on volunteers foundered because of burnout and high turnover. He acknowledged that more people need help than are receiving it and said the program will be extended to March to use available funds.

"The resources aren't there, but these resources certainly are coming," Cox said.