Pakistani Push in Tribal Areas Triggers a Flood of Refugees
By Candace Rondeaux | Washington Post Foreign Service | August 27, 2008
NOWSHERA, Pakistan -- Lal Bahadur walked down from the mountains about two weeks ago. With his back to Afghanistan and his wife and five children alongside, he descended steep inclines through the northern edge of Pakistan's tribal areas as artillery fire boomed around them. It was nearly a full day before the family found a place to rest. By the time they reached the district of Nawagai, the price of a ride to safety in the nearby city of Peshawar had already increased 10-fold.
When they arrived in Peshawar from the volatile tribal area of Bajaur, Bahadur found that apartment rents in the city had almost tripled, putting them well beyond his reach. So the family came here to this refugee camp about 45 miles east of Peshawar, where nearly 1,000 residents of Bajaur have recently sought shelter in the wake of a massive military offensive against Taliban insurgents.
An estimated 200,000 people from the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan have been displaced since the Pakistani army launched the Bajaur operation early this month in response to growing U.S. pressure to take action against the Taliban in the region, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Local officials say the flood of refugees into northwestern and central Pakistan has overwhelmed cities such as Peshawar. And as the army began to push into the tribal area of Kurram last week, government officials in cities as far away as Karachi were bracing for more waves of people.
The political and economic fallout from Pakistan's push against the Taliban and al-Qaeda has widened into a major humanitarian crisis, analysts and local officials here say. Yet a week after the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf, the government has announced no specific plans to address the refugee problem in the border regions, which now appears to be spilling over into the rest of the country.
Last week, the crisis grew so acute that Pascal Cuttat, head of the Red Cross in Pakistan, called urgently for shelter, medical treatment and food for Bajaur refugees. The aid agency estimates that the military operations in Bajaur and neighboring tribal areas have driven about 14,000 people westward across the border into the troubled Afghan province of Konar, where last month nine U.S. soldiers were killed in a well-coordinated Taliban-led attack.
In Peshawar, a city of more than 3 million, the waves of new arrivals have brought with them numerous problems. Last week, migrants held several protests in the city over the Bajaur offensive and the lack of government assistance. Peshawar's 5,000 police officers have struggled to contain the violence stemming from the protests and from clashes between refugees and local residents. And the influx of people has driven up prices for basic goods across the city, officials said.
"All around Peshawar, on every side, the situation is volatile because of the people coming from Bajaur, Bara, Dera Adam Khel and the people from Swat and Waziristan," said Ghulam Ali, the mayor. "All of this is impacting the infrastructure in Peshawar. The schools, the health system -- everything is overloaded."
Bahadur, 40, said he had little choice but to leave Bajaur. Pakistani troops have been pounding the area with bombs dropped from helicopter gunships and fighter jets since Aug. 10. He and dozens of refugees at the camp said they received no warning of the operation. "We had no idea it was going to happen. The government didn't tell us anything, and we didn't see them anywhere," Bahadur said.
Pakistani army officials have said that dozens of Islamist insurgents have been killed in the Bajaur operation. Little, however, has officially been said about the civilian toll. Local news reports suggest more than 200 people have been killed.
Meanwhile, the refugees at the camp in Nowshera wait and wonder about the fate of those they left behind, subsisting on two meals a day of beans and bread. Their own survival is not assured: An outbreak of cholera and typhoid fever has already killed two young girls here.
ad_icon
Subhan Ullah, the camp director, acknowledged that conditions are far from optimal and that the army's push into other tribal areas near Bajaur would probably increase the challenge for the government. Ullah said he is looking for a larger piece of land to accommodate the anticipated surge in numbers.
"We are doing what we can to support the people here," he said.
The government has set up several camps for tribal area refugees across the country. But as in the camp in Nowshera, abysmal conditions and outbreaks of disease have driven many to seek shelter elsewhere. In Rawalpindi, the garrison city near Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, hundreds of refugees set up camp in several parks this month. Last week, Rawalpindi police moved to disperse the camps.
Bahadur and several others at Nowshera said they are also considering leaving soon. It will almost certainly be months before he sees his home again, Bahadur acknowledged, but he said it is all he knows.
"We want to go back as soon as possible," he said. "We want to go home."
Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts
WaPo : Bush Begins Beijing Visit as China Rebukes His Rights Speech
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Bush Begins Beijing Visit as China Rebukes His Rights Speech
By Michael Abramowitz and Debbi Wilgoren | Washington Post Staff Writers | August 7, 2008
President Bush arrived in Beijing late today to begin his Olympics visit, even as the Chinese government reminded the world that it opposes interference from other countries on human rights issues. The stern warning from the Foreign Ministry came a day after Bush spoke out in Bangkok against China's detention of political dissidents and religious activists.
"We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential," Bush said. "We press for openness and justice, not to impose our beliefs but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs . . .
"The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings."
Hours later, China issued a statement saying its relations with the United States "has developed steadily in the last few years" and praising bilateral communication and cooperation between the two countries.
"As for the divergence on human rights and religions, we always advocate that both sides talk from a basis of mutual respect and equality, to enhance understanding and diminish divergence, and enlarge mutual consensus," the statement said, according to a translation provided by the Associated Press.
"We firmly oppose any words or acts that interfere in other countries' internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues."
Many human rights groups have criticized Bush for his decision to attend the Games and for what they call his unwillingness to confront Beijing over a crackdown on dissent and new Internet restrictions in the run-up to the Olympics. The advocates have pressed Bush to make a stronger statement while in Beijing about China's human rights practices or to meet with dissidents. But both scenarios appear unlikely. Bush has said he is going to the Olympics to cheer on U.S. athletes and to show his "respect" for the Chinese people.
Sophie Richardson, who monitors Asia for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in an e-mail that it is "absurd to try to sustain the claim that America's policies are principled while then effectively standing back and saying, 'We will watch from the sidelines while the Chinese do what they do.' " She said it is a "diplomatic travesty" for Bush not to meet with dissidents in Beijing or insist on a nationally broadcast speech on a free press or other issues.
Still, the president's comments, delivered in Thailand several hours before he left for Beijing, included stronger language than he had previously used in the buildup to the Olympics, including a statement that "America stands in firm opposition" to China's policy of detaining those who speak out against its policies. In Beijing, meanwhile, protesters continued to evade Chinese security efforts and take advantage of he Olympics spotlight to make their views known.
Even before Bush's speech, the Chinese government had bristled over Bush's decision to meet in the United States last week with five Chinese human rights activists.
White House press secretary Dana Perino said the president chose to make the comments this morning as part of a larger assessment of U.S. relations with Asia.
"This speech puts together what the president has been saying for 7 1/2 years but does it in a very focused way," she said. Perino said China "is one of the most important relationships that we have in the United States, and the speech is being given on the eve of his trip there. So he thought it was appropriate to talk about it at this point."
Bush divided his time yesterday between South Korea and Thailand, two close U.S. allies in the region. He spent the first part of the day in Seoul, where he held meetings and ate a lunch of American beef filet and Korean short ribs with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who has faced severe political problems after clearing the way for importing U.S. beef, which many South Koreans worry may carry mad cow disease.
A major focus of their talks was continuing efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. The United States recently agreed to take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism, as part of a deal in which the communist state would disable its main nuclear facility.
At a news conference with Lee, Bush said North Korea will not be removed from the list unless leader Kim Jong Il agrees to a plan to verify that it is disarming. Monday is the first day North Korea could be removed from the list, after a 45-day congressional review period expires, but Pyongyang has yet to come up with a plan acceptable to the United States and its allies, according to U.S. officials.
"We'll see," Bush told reporters. "It's his choice to make as to whether or not he comes off the list."
After a quick trip to rally with troops at the U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan, Bush flew to Thailand, where he held talks yesterday evening with Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej. Bush also highlighted the cause of Burmese freedom by meeting with Burmese dissidents. First lady Laura Bush toured the Mae La refugee camp Thursday morning on the Thai-Burmese border, and called on Burmese strongman Tan Shwe to begin "dialogues" with opposition figures.
Even some of President Bush's critics regard U.S. policies on Asia as a relative bright spot in his foreign policy legacy: Bush -- now on his ninth trip to Asia -- and his aides have spent much time cultivating better relationships with Japan and India while engaging China on trade, currency exchange rates and security concerns such as North Korea. Polls suggest that the U.S. standing in Asia is higher than in the rest of the world.
"The administration has improved relations with China and strengthened the alliance with Japan at the same time, which is kind of gravity-defying," said Michael Green, a former Bush aide who follows Asian affairs for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
A considerable part of the Bangkok speech was devoted to China, which Bush said he has found fascinating since first visiting his father there in 1975, when George H.W. Bush was serving as the top U.S. diplomat in Beijing.
"We are making it clear to China that being a global economic leader carries with it the duty to act responsibly on matters from energy to the environment to development in Africa," Bush said.
Bush also took credit for a calming of tensions in the Taiwan Strait, after pressing both Beijing and Taipei not to disturb the status quo -- meaning no Chinese military attack and no declaration of independence by Taiwan. Bush's policy has disturbed many of Taiwan's U.S. allies, who have complained that a de facto U.S. arms freeze is hindering Taiwan's efforts to cope with a resurgent Chinese military.
Bush said a "constructive relationship" on such issues has placed "America in a better position to be honest and direct on other issues," including human rights and religious freedom. "Ultimately, only China can decide what course it will follow," he said. "It will be clear for all to see that those who aspire to speak their conscience and worship their god are no threat to the future of China."
Abramowitz reported from Bangkok; Wilgoren reported from Washington.
By Michael Abramowitz and Debbi Wilgoren | Washington Post Staff Writers | August 7, 2008
President Bush arrived in Beijing late today to begin his Olympics visit, even as the Chinese government reminded the world that it opposes interference from other countries on human rights issues. The stern warning from the Foreign Ministry came a day after Bush spoke out in Bangkok against China's detention of political dissidents and religious activists.
"We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential," Bush said. "We press for openness and justice, not to impose our beliefs but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs . . .
"The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings."
Hours later, China issued a statement saying its relations with the United States "has developed steadily in the last few years" and praising bilateral communication and cooperation between the two countries.
"As for the divergence on human rights and religions, we always advocate that both sides talk from a basis of mutual respect and equality, to enhance understanding and diminish divergence, and enlarge mutual consensus," the statement said, according to a translation provided by the Associated Press.
"We firmly oppose any words or acts that interfere in other countries' internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues."
Many human rights groups have criticized Bush for his decision to attend the Games and for what they call his unwillingness to confront Beijing over a crackdown on dissent and new Internet restrictions in the run-up to the Olympics. The advocates have pressed Bush to make a stronger statement while in Beijing about China's human rights practices or to meet with dissidents. But both scenarios appear unlikely. Bush has said he is going to the Olympics to cheer on U.S. athletes and to show his "respect" for the Chinese people.
Sophie Richardson, who monitors Asia for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in an e-mail that it is "absurd to try to sustain the claim that America's policies are principled while then effectively standing back and saying, 'We will watch from the sidelines while the Chinese do what they do.' " She said it is a "diplomatic travesty" for Bush not to meet with dissidents in Beijing or insist on a nationally broadcast speech on a free press or other issues.
Still, the president's comments, delivered in Thailand several hours before he left for Beijing, included stronger language than he had previously used in the buildup to the Olympics, including a statement that "America stands in firm opposition" to China's policy of detaining those who speak out against its policies. In Beijing, meanwhile, protesters continued to evade Chinese security efforts and take advantage of he Olympics spotlight to make their views known.
Even before Bush's speech, the Chinese government had bristled over Bush's decision to meet in the United States last week with five Chinese human rights activists.
White House press secretary Dana Perino said the president chose to make the comments this morning as part of a larger assessment of U.S. relations with Asia.
"This speech puts together what the president has been saying for 7 1/2 years but does it in a very focused way," she said. Perino said China "is one of the most important relationships that we have in the United States, and the speech is being given on the eve of his trip there. So he thought it was appropriate to talk about it at this point."
Bush divided his time yesterday between South Korea and Thailand, two close U.S. allies in the region. He spent the first part of the day in Seoul, where he held meetings and ate a lunch of American beef filet and Korean short ribs with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, who has faced severe political problems after clearing the way for importing U.S. beef, which many South Koreans worry may carry mad cow disease.
A major focus of their talks was continuing efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. The United States recently agreed to take North Korea off its list of state sponsors of terrorism, as part of a deal in which the communist state would disable its main nuclear facility.
At a news conference with Lee, Bush said North Korea will not be removed from the list unless leader Kim Jong Il agrees to a plan to verify that it is disarming. Monday is the first day North Korea could be removed from the list, after a 45-day congressional review period expires, but Pyongyang has yet to come up with a plan acceptable to the United States and its allies, according to U.S. officials.
"We'll see," Bush told reporters. "It's his choice to make as to whether or not he comes off the list."
After a quick trip to rally with troops at the U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan, Bush flew to Thailand, where he held talks yesterday evening with Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej. Bush also highlighted the cause of Burmese freedom by meeting with Burmese dissidents. First lady Laura Bush toured the Mae La refugee camp Thursday morning on the Thai-Burmese border, and called on Burmese strongman Tan Shwe to begin "dialogues" with opposition figures.
Even some of President Bush's critics regard U.S. policies on Asia as a relative bright spot in his foreign policy legacy: Bush -- now on his ninth trip to Asia -- and his aides have spent much time cultivating better relationships with Japan and India while engaging China on trade, currency exchange rates and security concerns such as North Korea. Polls suggest that the U.S. standing in Asia is higher than in the rest of the world.
"The administration has improved relations with China and strengthened the alliance with Japan at the same time, which is kind of gravity-defying," said Michael Green, a former Bush aide who follows Asian affairs for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
A considerable part of the Bangkok speech was devoted to China, which Bush said he has found fascinating since first visiting his father there in 1975, when George H.W. Bush was serving as the top U.S. diplomat in Beijing.
"We are making it clear to China that being a global economic leader carries with it the duty to act responsibly on matters from energy to the environment to development in Africa," Bush said.
Bush also took credit for a calming of tensions in the Taiwan Strait, after pressing both Beijing and Taipei not to disturb the status quo -- meaning no Chinese military attack and no declaration of independence by Taiwan. Bush's policy has disturbed many of Taiwan's U.S. allies, who have complained that a de facto U.S. arms freeze is hindering Taiwan's efforts to cope with a resurgent Chinese military.
Bush said a "constructive relationship" on such issues has placed "America in a better position to be honest and direct on other issues," including human rights and religious freedom. "Ultimately, only China can decide what course it will follow," he said. "It will be clear for all to see that those who aspire to speak their conscience and worship their god are no threat to the future of China."
Abramowitz reported from Bangkok; Wilgoren reported from Washington.
Filed under
China,
George Bush,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, August 07, 2008
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
Salon : Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power
Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.
By Tim Shorrock | July 23, 2008
The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.
While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.
Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.
The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.
"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.
"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated."
The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency's use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government's extensive use of military assets -- including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes -- for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.
Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA's use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government's extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department's list of "specially designated global terrorists" to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, "our cities would be ablaze." A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government's "inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect."
"It's not just the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,'" agrees Gregory T. Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the Bush administration's misleading name for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. "We need a broad investigation on the way all the moving parts fit together. It seems like we're always looking at little chunks and missing the big picture."
A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.
The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the surveillance program -- former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel -- testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that "involved computer searches through massive electronic databases" containing "records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans."
According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration's domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.
Hamilton's company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors' Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. "It operates just like Google," Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.
Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software -- and its outstanding ability to search other databases -- to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.
Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA's use of PROMIS involved something "so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem," Hamilton told me. He added, "I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core." Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw's behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.
Hamilton says James B. Comey's congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft's dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. "It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans," he told me.
Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government's use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, "he turned white as a sheet."
An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention."
The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans' lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU's Steinhardt, it would be "pretty frightening stuff."
The Inslaw case also points to what may be an extensive role played by the NSA in financial spying inside the United States. According to reports over the years in the U.S. and foreign press, Inslaw's PROMIS software was embedded surreptitiously in systems sold to foreign and global banks as a way to give the NSA secret "backdoor" access to the electronic flow of money around the world.
In May, I interviewed Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush administration back to the Reagan administration. According to Bailey -- who from 2006 to 2007 headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela -- the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s.
From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan's National Security Council, called "Follow the Money," that used NSA signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. PROMIS, he told me, was "the principal software element" used by the NSA and the Treasury Department then in their electronic surveillance programs tracking financial flows to the Soviet bloc, organized crime and terrorist groups. His admission is the first public acknowledgement by a former U.S. intelligence official that the NSA used the PROMIS software.
According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies. "That was the beginning of the whole process," he said.
After 9/11, this capability was instantly seen within the U.S. government as a critical tool in the war on terror -- and apparently was deployed by the Bush administration inside the United States, in cases involving alleged terrorist supporters. One such case was that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Oregon, which was accused of having terrorist ties after the NSA, at the request of the Treasury Department, eavesdropped on the phone calls of Al-Haramain officials and their American lawyers. The charges against Al-Haramain were based primarily on secret evidence that the Bush administration refused to disclose in legal proceedings; Al-Haramain's lawyers argued in a lawsuit that was a violation of the defendants' due process rights.
According to Bailey, the NSA also likely would have used its technological capabilities to track the charity's financial activity. "The vast majority of financial movements of any significance take place electronically, so intercepts have become an extremely important element" in intelligence, he explained. "If the government suspects that a particular Muslim charitable organization is engaged in collecting funds to funnel to terrorists, the NSA would be asked to follow the money going into and out of the bank accounts of that charity." (The now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation, although affiliated with a Saudi Arabian-based global charity, was founded and based in Ashland, Ore.)
The use of a powerful database and extensive watch lists, Bailey said, would make the NSA's job much easier. "The biggest problems with intercepts, quite frankly, is that the volumes of data, daily or even by the hour, are gigantic," he said. "Unless you have a very precise idea of what it is you're looking for, the NSA people or their counterparts [overseas] will just throw up their hands and say 'forget it.'" Regarding domestic surveillance, Bailey said there's a "whole gray area where the initiation of the transaction was in the United States and the final destination was outside, or vice versa. That's something for the lawyers to figure out."
Bailey's information on the evolution of the Reagan intelligence program appears to corroborate and clarify an article published in March in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the NSA was conducting domestic surveillance using "an ad-hoc collection of so-called 'black programs' whose existence is undisclosed." Some of these programs began "years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach." Among them, the article said, are a joint NSA-Treasury database on financial transactions that dates back "about 15 years" to 1993. That's not quite right, Bailey clarified: "It started in the early '80s, at least 10 years before."
Main Core may be the contemporary incarnation of a government watch list system that was part of a highly classified "Continuity of Government" program created by the Reagan administration to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack. Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered to be threats to national security. The emergency measures for domestic security were to be carried out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army.
In the late 1980s, reports about a domestic database linked to FEMA and the Continuity of Government program began to appear in the press. For example, in 1986 the Austin American-Statesman uncovered evidence of a large database that authorities were proposing to use to intern Latino dissidents and refugees during a national emergency that might follow a potential U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. During the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, questions to Reagan aide Oliver North about the database were ruled out of order by the committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, because of the "highly sensitive and classified" nature of FEMA's domestic security operations.
In September 2001, according to "The Rise of the Vulcans," a 2004 book on Bush's war cabinet by James Mann, a contemporary version of the Continuity of Government program was put into play in the hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Vice President Cheney and senior members of Congress were dispersed to "undisclosed locations" to maintain government functions. It was during this emergency period, Hamilton and other former government officials believe, that President Bush may have authorized the NSA to begin actively using the Main Core database for domestic surveillance. One indicator they cite is a statement by Bush in December 2005, after the New York Times had revealed the NSA's warrantless wiretapping, in which he made a rare reference to the emergency program: The Justice Department's legal reviews of the NSA activity, Bush said, were based on "fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government."
It is noteworthy that two key players on Bush's national security team, Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, have been involved in the Continuity of Government program since its inception. Along with Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's first secretary of defense, both men took part in simulated drills for the program during the 1980s and early 1990s. Addington's role was disclosed in "The Dark Side," a book published this month about the Bush administration's war on terror by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. In the book, Mayer calls Addington "the father of the [NSA] eavesdropping program," and reports that he was the key figure involved in the 2004 dispute between the White House and the Justice Department over the legality of the program. That would seem to make him a prime witness for a broader investigation.
Getting a full picture on Bush's intelligence programs, however, will almost certainly require any sweeping new investigation to have a scope that would inoculate it against charges of partisanship. During one recent discussion on Capitol Hill, according to a participant, a senior aide to Speaker Pelosi was asked for Pelosi's views on a proposal to expand the investigation to past administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. "The question was, how far back in time would we have to go to make this credible?" the participant in the meeting recalled.
That question was answered in the seven-page memo. "The rise of the 'surveillance state' driven by new technologies and the demands of counter-terrorism did not begin with this Administration," the author wrote. Even though he acknowledged in interviews with Salon that the scope of abuse under George W. Bush would likely be an order of magnitude greater than under preceding presidents, he recommended in the memo that any new investigation follow the precedent of the Church Committee and investigate the origins of Bush's programs, going as far back as the Reagan administration.
The proposal has emerged in a political climate reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Church Committee was formed in 1975 in the wake of media reports about illegal spying against American antiwar activists and civil rights leaders, CIA assassination squads, and other dubious activities under Nixon and his predecessors. Chaired by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the committee interviewed more than 800 officials and held 21 public hearings. As a result of its work, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required warrants and court supervision for domestic wiretaps, and created intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate.
So far, no lawmaker has openly endorsed a proposal for a new Church Committee-style investigation. A spokesman for Pelosi declined to say whether Pelosi herself would be in favor of a broader probe into U.S. intelligence. On the Senate side, the most logical supporters for a broader probe would be Democratic senators such as Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who led the failed fight against the recent Bush-backed changes to FISA. (Both Feingold and Leahy's offices declined to comment on a broader intelligence inquiry.)
The Democrats' reticence on such action ultimately may be rooted in congressional complicity with the Bush administration's intelligence policies. Many of the war on terror programs, including the NSA's warrantless surveillance and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," were cleared with key congressional Democrats, including Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Rockefeller, and former House Intelligence chairwoman Jane Harman, among others.
The discussions about a broad investigation were jump-started among civil liberties advocates this spring, when it became clear that the Democrats didn't have the votes to oppose the Bush-backed bill updating FISA. The new legislation could prevent the full story of the NSA surveillance programs from ever being uncovered; it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that may have violated FISA by collaborating with the NSA on warrantless wiretapping. Opponents of Bush's policies were further angered when Democratic leaders stripped from their competing FISA bill a provision that would have established a national commission to investigate post-9/11 surveillance programs.
The next president obviously would play a key role in any decision to investigate intelligence abuses. Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, is running as a champion of Bush's national security policies and would be unlikely to embrace an investigation that would, foremost, embarrass his own party. (Randy Scheunemann, McCain's spokesman on national security, declined to comment.)
Some see a brighter prospect in Barack Obama, should he be elected. The plus with Obama, says the former Church Committee staffer, is that as a proponent of open government, he could order the executive branch to be more cooperative with Congress, rolling back the obsessive secrecy and stonewalling of the Bush White House. That could open the door to greater congressional scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence community, since the legislative branch lacked any real teeth under Bush. (Obama's spokesman on national security, Ben Rhodes, did not reply to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.)
But even that may be a lofty hope. "It may be the last thing a new president would want to do," said a participant in the ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, he said, "some people see the Church Committee ideas as a substitute for prosecutions that should already have happened."
Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.
By Tim Shorrock | July 23, 2008
The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.
While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.
Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.
The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.
"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.
"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated."
The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency's use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government's extensive use of military assets -- including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes -- for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.
Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA's use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government's extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department's list of "specially designated global terrorists" to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, "our cities would be ablaze." A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government's "inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect."
"It's not just the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,'" agrees Gregory T. Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the Bush administration's misleading name for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. "We need a broad investigation on the way all the moving parts fit together. It seems like we're always looking at little chunks and missing the big picture."
A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.
The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the surveillance program -- former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel -- testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that "involved computer searches through massive electronic databases" containing "records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans."
According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration's domestic surveillance operations use Main Core.
Hamilton's company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement community for creating a program called the Prosecutors' Management Information System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. "It operates just like Google," Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in May.
Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software -- and its outstanding ability to search other databases -- to manage intelligence operations and track financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core database.
Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA's use of PROMIS involved something "so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem," Hamilton told me. He added, "I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main Core." Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw's behalf alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence use.
Hamilton says James B. Comey's congressional testimony in May 2007, in which he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft's dramatic standoff with senior Bush officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. "It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans," he told me.
Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government's use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he recognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, "he turned white as a sheet."
An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention."
The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans' lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU's Steinhardt, it would be "pretty frightening stuff."
The Inslaw case also points to what may be an extensive role played by the NSA in financial spying inside the United States. According to reports over the years in the U.S. and foreign press, Inslaw's PROMIS software was embedded surreptitiously in systems sold to foreign and global banks as a way to give the NSA secret "backdoor" access to the electronic flow of money around the world.
In May, I interviewed Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush administration back to the Reagan administration. According to Bailey -- who from 2006 to 2007 headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela -- the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s.
From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan's National Security Council, called "Follow the Money," that used NSA signals intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. PROMIS, he told me, was "the principal software element" used by the NSA and the Treasury Department then in their electronic surveillance programs tracking financial flows to the Soviet bloc, organized crime and terrorist groups. His admission is the first public acknowledgement by a former U.S. intelligence official that the NSA used the PROMIS software.
According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows to suspected criminals and American enemies. "That was the beginning of the whole process," he said.
After 9/11, this capability was instantly seen within the U.S. government as a critical tool in the war on terror -- and apparently was deployed by the Bush administration inside the United States, in cases involving alleged terrorist supporters. One such case was that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in Oregon, which was accused of having terrorist ties after the NSA, at the request of the Treasury Department, eavesdropped on the phone calls of Al-Haramain officials and their American lawyers. The charges against Al-Haramain were based primarily on secret evidence that the Bush administration refused to disclose in legal proceedings; Al-Haramain's lawyers argued in a lawsuit that was a violation of the defendants' due process rights.
According to Bailey, the NSA also likely would have used its technological capabilities to track the charity's financial activity. "The vast majority of financial movements of any significance take place electronically, so intercepts have become an extremely important element" in intelligence, he explained. "If the government suspects that a particular Muslim charitable organization is engaged in collecting funds to funnel to terrorists, the NSA would be asked to follow the money going into and out of the bank accounts of that charity." (The now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation, although affiliated with a Saudi Arabian-based global charity, was founded and based in Ashland, Ore.)
The use of a powerful database and extensive watch lists, Bailey said, would make the NSA's job much easier. "The biggest problems with intercepts, quite frankly, is that the volumes of data, daily or even by the hour, are gigantic," he said. "Unless you have a very precise idea of what it is you're looking for, the NSA people or their counterparts [overseas] will just throw up their hands and say 'forget it.'" Regarding domestic surveillance, Bailey said there's a "whole gray area where the initiation of the transaction was in the United States and the final destination was outside, or vice versa. That's something for the lawyers to figure out."
Bailey's information on the evolution of the Reagan intelligence program appears to corroborate and clarify an article published in March in the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the NSA was conducting domestic surveillance using "an ad-hoc collection of so-called 'black programs' whose existence is undisclosed." Some of these programs began "years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach." Among them, the article said, are a joint NSA-Treasury database on financial transactions that dates back "about 15 years" to 1993. That's not quite right, Bailey clarified: "It started in the early '80s, at least 10 years before."
Main Core may be the contemporary incarnation of a government watch list system that was part of a highly classified "Continuity of Government" program created by the Reagan administration to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack. Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered to be threats to national security. The emergency measures for domestic security were to be carried out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army.
In the late 1980s, reports about a domestic database linked to FEMA and the Continuity of Government program began to appear in the press. For example, in 1986 the Austin American-Statesman uncovered evidence of a large database that authorities were proposing to use to intern Latino dissidents and refugees during a national emergency that might follow a potential U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. During the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, questions to Reagan aide Oliver North about the database were ruled out of order by the committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, because of the "highly sensitive and classified" nature of FEMA's domestic security operations.
In September 2001, according to "The Rise of the Vulcans," a 2004 book on Bush's war cabinet by James Mann, a contemporary version of the Continuity of Government program was put into play in the hours after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when Vice President Cheney and senior members of Congress were dispersed to "undisclosed locations" to maintain government functions. It was during this emergency period, Hamilton and other former government officials believe, that President Bush may have authorized the NSA to begin actively using the Main Core database for domestic surveillance. One indicator they cite is a statement by Bush in December 2005, after the New York Times had revealed the NSA's warrantless wiretapping, in which he made a rare reference to the emergency program: The Justice Department's legal reviews of the NSA activity, Bush said, were based on "fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the continuity of our government."
It is noteworthy that two key players on Bush's national security team, Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, have been involved in the Continuity of Government program since its inception. Along with Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's first secretary of defense, both men took part in simulated drills for the program during the 1980s and early 1990s. Addington's role was disclosed in "The Dark Side," a book published this month about the Bush administration's war on terror by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. In the book, Mayer calls Addington "the father of the [NSA] eavesdropping program," and reports that he was the key figure involved in the 2004 dispute between the White House and the Justice Department over the legality of the program. That would seem to make him a prime witness for a broader investigation.
Getting a full picture on Bush's intelligence programs, however, will almost certainly require any sweeping new investigation to have a scope that would inoculate it against charges of partisanship. During one recent discussion on Capitol Hill, according to a participant, a senior aide to Speaker Pelosi was asked for Pelosi's views on a proposal to expand the investigation to past administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. "The question was, how far back in time would we have to go to make this credible?" the participant in the meeting recalled.
That question was answered in the seven-page memo. "The rise of the 'surveillance state' driven by new technologies and the demands of counter-terrorism did not begin with this Administration," the author wrote. Even though he acknowledged in interviews with Salon that the scope of abuse under George W. Bush would likely be an order of magnitude greater than under preceding presidents, he recommended in the memo that any new investigation follow the precedent of the Church Committee and investigate the origins of Bush's programs, going as far back as the Reagan administration.
The proposal has emerged in a political climate reminiscent of the Watergate era. The Church Committee was formed in 1975 in the wake of media reports about illegal spying against American antiwar activists and civil rights leaders, CIA assassination squads, and other dubious activities under Nixon and his predecessors. Chaired by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the committee interviewed more than 800 officials and held 21 public hearings. As a result of its work, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required warrants and court supervision for domestic wiretaps, and created intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate.
So far, no lawmaker has openly endorsed a proposal for a new Church Committee-style investigation. A spokesman for Pelosi declined to say whether Pelosi herself would be in favor of a broader probe into U.S. intelligence. On the Senate side, the most logical supporters for a broader probe would be Democratic senators such as Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who led the failed fight against the recent Bush-backed changes to FISA. (Both Feingold and Leahy's offices declined to comment on a broader intelligence inquiry.)
The Democrats' reticence on such action ultimately may be rooted in congressional complicity with the Bush administration's intelligence policies. Many of the war on terror programs, including the NSA's warrantless surveillance and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," were cleared with key congressional Democrats, including Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Rockefeller, and former House Intelligence chairwoman Jane Harman, among others.
The discussions about a broad investigation were jump-started among civil liberties advocates this spring, when it became clear that the Democrats didn't have the votes to oppose the Bush-backed bill updating FISA. The new legislation could prevent the full story of the NSA surveillance programs from ever being uncovered; it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that may have violated FISA by collaborating with the NSA on warrantless wiretapping. Opponents of Bush's policies were further angered when Democratic leaders stripped from their competing FISA bill a provision that would have established a national commission to investigate post-9/11 surveillance programs.
The next president obviously would play a key role in any decision to investigate intelligence abuses. Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, is running as a champion of Bush's national security policies and would be unlikely to embrace an investigation that would, foremost, embarrass his own party. (Randy Scheunemann, McCain's spokesman on national security, declined to comment.)
Some see a brighter prospect in Barack Obama, should he be elected. The plus with Obama, says the former Church Committee staffer, is that as a proponent of open government, he could order the executive branch to be more cooperative with Congress, rolling back the obsessive secrecy and stonewalling of the Bush White House. That could open the door to greater congressional scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence community, since the legislative branch lacked any real teeth under Bush. (Obama's spokesman on national security, Ben Rhodes, did not reply to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.)
But even that may be a lofty hope. "It may be the last thing a new president would want to do," said a participant in the ongoing discussions. Unfortunately, he said, "some people see the Church Committee ideas as a substitute for prosecutions that should already have happened."
Filed under
abuse of power,
Bush,
lawyers,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Sunday, August 03, 2008
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
NYT : Barack Obama: My Plan for Iraq
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
My Plan for Iraq
By BARACK OBAMA | July 14, 2008
CHICAGO — The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.
The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.
In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.
But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.
The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.
Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.
But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.
As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.
In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.
Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.
As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.
In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.
It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.
Barack Obama, a United States senator from Illinois, is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
By BARACK OBAMA | July 14, 2008
CHICAGO — The call by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for a timetable for the removal of American troops from Iraq presents an enormous opportunity. We should seize this moment to begin the phased redeployment of combat troops that I have long advocated, and that is needed for long-term success in Iraq and the security interests of the United States.
The differences on Iraq in this campaign are deep. Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and we have spent nearly $1 trillion. Our military is overstretched. Nearly every threat we face — from Afghanistan to Al Qaeda to Iran — has grown.
In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge, our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda — greatly weakening its effectiveness.
But the same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true. The strain on our military has grown, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and we’ve spent nearly $200 billion more in Iraq than we had budgeted. Iraq’s leaders have failed to invest tens of billions of dollars in oil revenues in rebuilding their own country, and they have not reached the political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge.
The good news is that Iraq’s leaders want to take responsibility for their country by negotiating a timetable for the removal of American troops. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. James Dubik, the American officer in charge of training Iraq’s security forces, estimates that the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to assume responsibility for security in 2009.
Only by redeploying our troops can we press the Iraqis to reach comprehensive political accommodation and achieve a successful transition to Iraqis’ taking responsibility for the security and stability of their country. Instead of seizing the moment and encouraging Iraqis to step up, the Bush administration and Senator McCain are refusing to embrace this transition — despite their previous commitments to respect the will of Iraq’s sovereign government. They call any timetable for the removal of American troops “surrender,” even though we would be turning Iraq over to a sovereign Iraqi government.
But this is not a strategy for success — it is a strategy for staying that runs contrary to the will of the Iraqi people, the American people and the security interests of the United States. That is why, on my first day in office, I would give the military a new mission: ending this war.
As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal.
In carrying out this strategy, we would inevitably need to make tactical adjustments. As I have often said, I would consult with commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government to ensure that our troops were redeployed safely, and our interests protected. We would move them from secure areas first and volatile areas later. We would pursue a diplomatic offensive with every nation in the region on behalf of Iraq’s stability, and commit $2 billion to a new international effort to support Iraq’s refugees.
Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won’t have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq.
As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there. I would not hold our military, our resources and our foreign policy hostage to a misguided desire to maintain permanent bases in Iraq.
In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.
It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war.
Barack Obama, a United States senator from Illinois, is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
Filed under
Barack Obama,
Iraq,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, July 15, 2008
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
WaPo : Post-9/11 Dragnet Turns Up Surprises
Monday, July 07, 2008
Post-9/11 Dragnet Turns Up Surprises
Biometrics Link Foreign Detainees To Arrests in U.S.
By Ellen Nakashima | Washington Post Staff Writer | July 6, 2008
In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.
There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.
The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.
"I found the number stunning," said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. "It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States."
The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond "known or suspected" terrorists.
Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.
Civil libertarians have raised concerns about whether people on the watch lists have been appropriately determined to be terrorists, a process that senior government officials acknowledge is an art, not a science.
Large-scale identity systems "can raise serious privacy concerns, if not singly, then jointly and severally," said a 2007 study by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Biometrics. The ability "to cross reference and draw new, previously unimagined, inferences," is a boon for the government and the bane of privacy advocates, it said.
An FBI Mission
The effort, officials say, is bearing fruit.
"The bottom line is we're locking people up," said Thomas E. Bush III, FBI assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services division. "Stopping people coming into this country. Identifying IED-makers in a way never done before. That's the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We're pushing our borders back."
In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station.
The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer's ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI's criminal biometric database.
As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.
"Frankly I was surprised that we were getting those kind of hits at all," recalled Townsend, who left government in January. They identified "a potential vulnerability" to national security the government had not fully appreciated, she said.
The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. "One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad," he said. "They'd already made this commitment."
One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay.
Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group.
The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency's database.
While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington.
Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. "It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture," he said. "Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas."
Errors in matching, though rare, have occurred. In a noted 2004 case, Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield was erroneously named as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people. FBI lab analysts matched a print lifted from a plastic bag at the crime scene to his fingerprints that were stored in the FBI's criminal database because of a 1985 arrest for auto burglary when he was a teenager. The charge had been dismissed. After a critical Justice Department Inspector General audit, the FBI made fixes in its system. A recent inspector general report found the FBI fingerprint matching to be generally accurate.
Worries About Watch List
Civil libertarians, however, worry that the systems are not transparent enough for outsiders to tell how the government decides who belongs on a watch list and how that information is handled.
"The day when the federal government can tell people the basis they've been put on the watch list is the day we can have more confidence in biometric identification," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Vetting the data is the job of analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center, an office park-like complex in McLean run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Analysts there scour intelligence reports to create the master international terrorist watch list.
"You cannot draw a bright red line and say that's a terrorist, this person isn't," said Russ Travers, an NCTC deputy director. "If somebody swears allegiance to Bin Laden, that's an easy case. If somebody goes to a terrorist training camp, that's probably an easy case. What if a person goes to a camp and decides, 'I don't want to go to a camp, I want to go home.' Where do you draw the line?"
Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person's biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots.
For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work.
Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks.
Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said.
In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said.
If Iraq and Afghanistan were a proving ground of sorts for biometric watch-listing, the U.S. government is moving quickly to try to build a domestic version. Since September 2006, Homeland Security and the FBI have been operating a pilot program in which police officers in Boston, Dallas and Houston run prints of arrestees against a Homeland Security database of immigration law violators and a State Department database of people refused visas. Federal job applicants' prints also are run against the databases. To date, some 500 people have been found in the database and thus are of interest to Homeland Security officials.
Steve Nixon, a director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the effort is key to national security.
"When we look at the road and the challenges, globalization and the spread of technology has empowered small groups of individuals, bad guys, to be more powerful than at any other time in history," he said. "We have to know who these people are when we encounter them. A lot of what we're doing in intelligence now is trying to identify a person. Biometrics is a key element of that."
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
Biometrics Link Foreign Detainees To Arrests in U.S.
By Ellen Nakashima | Washington Post Staff Writer | July 6, 2008
In the six-and-a-half years that the U.S. government has been fingerprinting insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa, hundreds have turned out to share an unexpected background, FBI and military officials said. They have criminal arrest records in the United States.
There was the suspected militant fleeing Somalia who had been arrested on a drug charge in New Jersey. And the man stopped at a checkpoint in Tikrit who claimed to be a dirt farmer but had 11 felony charges in the United States, including assault with a deadly weapon.
The records suggest that potential enemies abroad know a great deal about the United States because many of them have lived here, officials said. The matches also reflect the power of sharing data across agencies and even countries, data that links an identity to a distinguishing human characteristic such as a fingerprint.
"I found the number stunning," said Frances Fragos Townsend, a security consultant and former assistant to the president for homeland security. "It suggested to me that this was going to give us far greater insight into the relationships between individuals fighting against U.S. forces in the theater and potential U.S. cells or support networks here in the United States."
The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond "known or suspected" terrorists.
Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.
Civil libertarians have raised concerns about whether people on the watch lists have been appropriately determined to be terrorists, a process that senior government officials acknowledge is an art, not a science.
Large-scale identity systems "can raise serious privacy concerns, if not singly, then jointly and severally," said a 2007 study by the Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Biometrics. The ability "to cross reference and draw new, previously unimagined, inferences," is a boon for the government and the bane of privacy advocates, it said.
An FBI Mission
The effort, officials say, is bearing fruit.
"The bottom line is we're locking people up," said Thomas E. Bush III, FBI assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services division. "Stopping people coming into this country. Identifying IED-makers in a way never done before. That's the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We're pushing our borders back."
In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station.
The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer's ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI's criminal biometric database.
As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.
"Frankly I was surprised that we were getting those kind of hits at all," recalled Townsend, who left government in January. They identified "a potential vulnerability" to national security the government had not fully appreciated, she said.
The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. "One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad," he said. "They'd already made this commitment."
One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay.
Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group.
The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency's database.
While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington.
Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. "It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture," he said. "Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas."
Errors in matching, though rare, have occurred. In a noted 2004 case, Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield was erroneously named as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people. FBI lab analysts matched a print lifted from a plastic bag at the crime scene to his fingerprints that were stored in the FBI's criminal database because of a 1985 arrest for auto burglary when he was a teenager. The charge had been dismissed. After a critical Justice Department Inspector General audit, the FBI made fixes in its system. A recent inspector general report found the FBI fingerprint matching to be generally accurate.
Worries About Watch List
Civil libertarians, however, worry that the systems are not transparent enough for outsiders to tell how the government decides who belongs on a watch list and how that information is handled.
"The day when the federal government can tell people the basis they've been put on the watch list is the day we can have more confidence in biometric identification," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Vetting the data is the job of analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center, an office park-like complex in McLean run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Analysts there scour intelligence reports to create the master international terrorist watch list.
"You cannot draw a bright red line and say that's a terrorist, this person isn't," said Russ Travers, an NCTC deputy director. "If somebody swears allegiance to Bin Laden, that's an easy case. If somebody goes to a terrorist training camp, that's probably an easy case. What if a person goes to a camp and decides, 'I don't want to go to a camp, I want to go home.' Where do you draw the line?"
Investigators are working on ever more sophisticated ways to evaluate the data. Analysts at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, for instance, use software to scrutinize intelligence reports from sources such as electronic surveillance and informants. They then link the information to a person's biographic and biometric data, and look for relationships that might detect terrorists and plots.
For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work.
Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks.
Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said.
In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists, Richardson said.
If Iraq and Afghanistan were a proving ground of sorts for biometric watch-listing, the U.S. government is moving quickly to try to build a domestic version. Since September 2006, Homeland Security and the FBI have been operating a pilot program in which police officers in Boston, Dallas and Houston run prints of arrestees against a Homeland Security database of immigration law violators and a State Department database of people refused visas. Federal job applicants' prints also are run against the databases. To date, some 500 people have been found in the database and thus are of interest to Homeland Security officials.
Steve Nixon, a director at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the effort is key to national security.
"When we look at the road and the challenges, globalization and the spread of technology has empowered small groups of individuals, bad guys, to be more powerful than at any other time in history," he said. "We have to know who these people are when we encounter them. A lot of what we're doing in intelligence now is trying to identify a person. Biometrics is a key element of that."
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
Filed under
GWOT,
homegrown terrorism,
lawyers,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Monday, July 07, 2008
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
NYT : Gunmen Kill U.N. Official in Somalia
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Gunmen Kill U.N. Official in Somalia
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | Published: July 7, 2008
MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — Gunmen opened fire on people leaving a mosque in Mogadishu on Sunday night, killing one of the country’s senior United Nations officials and wounding his son and another man, a witness and a family member said.
Attacks on officials, including those working for the United Nations and international aid agencies, are common in Somalia, where Islamic militants have vowed to fight an insurgency against the country’s weak government, which is supported by the United Nations.
Osman Ali Ahmed, the head of the United Nations Development Program for Somalia, was covered in blood and unconscious as he was rushed to a hospital after Sunday’s shooting, said Hassan Ali, a witness and a neighbor of Mr. Ahmed’s. Mr. Ali said it was not clear how seriously Mr. Ahmed’s son and the other man had been wounded.
Mr. Ahmed’s wife, Masteho Abubakr Yusus, later said in an interview that her husband had died at the African Union hospital.
The shooting occurred a day after an explosion killed a Somali official, his wife and four other people in Mogadishu.
On June 21, Hassan Muhammad Ali, head of the office of the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees, was abducted from his home on the outskirts of Mogadishu.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | Published: July 7, 2008
MOGADISHU, Somalia (AP) — Gunmen opened fire on people leaving a mosque in Mogadishu on Sunday night, killing one of the country’s senior United Nations officials and wounding his son and another man, a witness and a family member said.
Attacks on officials, including those working for the United Nations and international aid agencies, are common in Somalia, where Islamic militants have vowed to fight an insurgency against the country’s weak government, which is supported by the United Nations.
Osman Ali Ahmed, the head of the United Nations Development Program for Somalia, was covered in blood and unconscious as he was rushed to a hospital after Sunday’s shooting, said Hassan Ali, a witness and a neighbor of Mr. Ahmed’s. Mr. Ali said it was not clear how seriously Mr. Ahmed’s son and the other man had been wounded.
Mr. Ahmed’s wife, Masteho Abubakr Yusus, later said in an interview that her husband had died at the African Union hospital.
The shooting occurred a day after an explosion killed a Somali official, his wife and four other people in Mogadishu.
On June 21, Hassan Muhammad Ali, head of the office of the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees, was abducted from his home on the outskirts of Mogadishu.
Chris Floyd : Five Years and Counting: A Milestone on America's Long March Into Hell
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Five Years and Counting: A Milestone on America's Long March Into Hell
by Chris Floyd | March 20, 2008
We've all seen a blizzard of articles noting the five-year anniversary of the act of aggression launched against Iraq at the order of George W. Bush. There have been great slag-heaps of mendacity among these commemorations -- none more foul than the stinking torrent of lies that poured forth through the blood-flecked teeth of Bush himself on Wednesday -- but also some excellent analyses of the true situation in Iraq in this fifth year of hell.
The latter include the series of text and video reports from Baghdad by Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. (The latest piece is here. The whole series can be found here.) Another noteworthy witness is Patrick Cockburn. His latest story focuses on the use of deliberate lies "often swallowed whole by the media and a thousand times repeated, which cumulatively mask the terrible reality of Iraq." It is worth quoting at length:
Cockburn offers a more recent example to show that the same carnival of deceit that marked the war's beginning is still going on:
Seamus Milne takes up this theme of neglect -- where, as he puts it, the vast suffering in Iraq "has been somehow normalised as a kind of background noise" -- in his excellent summation in Thursday's Guardian:
This is a woeful record indeed -- and the fifth anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq is just a small milestone that we are speeding past on a long journey into darkness. As an American, one can only echo the words of Senator Robert Byrd five years ago, when this flawed and conflicted man rose as one of the very few in the entire political establishment to condemn Bush's Hitlerian action: "Today, I weep for my country."
by Chris Floyd | March 20, 2008
We've all seen a blizzard of articles noting the five-year anniversary of the act of aggression launched against Iraq at the order of George W. Bush. There have been great slag-heaps of mendacity among these commemorations -- none more foul than the stinking torrent of lies that poured forth through the blood-flecked teeth of Bush himself on Wednesday -- but also some excellent analyses of the true situation in Iraq in this fifth year of hell.
The latter include the series of text and video reports from Baghdad by Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. (The latest piece is here. The whole series can be found here.) Another noteworthy witness is Patrick Cockburn. His latest story focuses on the use of deliberate lies "often swallowed whole by the media and a thousand times repeated, which cumulatively mask the terrible reality of Iraq." It is worth quoting at length:
It has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.I must demur slightly from Cockburn here. I believe there is very little if any self-deception about Iraq on the part of Bush, Cheney, Tony Blair (or his replacment puppy, Gordon Brown). The mendacity that has characterized their every statement about the conflict throughout its duration has been deliberate, conscious, knowing, and willful. When they go to bed at night, they know they have lied about the war. When they look in the mirror, they know they have lied about the war. Now, it may be that they delude themselves into thinking that their conscious lies about the war are in the service of "a greater good" -- which they identify with the perpetuation of the wealth and privilege of the elites they belong to and represent. But about the falsity of the propaganda they use in order to justify and continue the carnage and war profiteering in Iraq, there are no delusions. They know exactly what they are doing.
The outcome has been an official picture of Iraq akin to fantasy and an inability to learn from mistakes because of a refusal to admit that any occurred. Yet the war began with just such a mistake. Five years ago, on the evening of 19 March 2003, President George Bush appeared on American television to say that military action had started against Iraq.
This was a veiled reference to an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein by dropping four 2,000 lb. bombs and firing 40 cruise missiles at a place called al-Dura farm in south Baghdad, where the Iraqi leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker. There was no bunker. The only casualties were one civilian killed and 14 wounded, including nine women and a child.
On 7 April, the US Air Force dropped four more massive bombs on a house where Saddam was said to have been sighted in Baghdad. "I think we did get Saddam Hussein," said the US Vice President, Dick Cheney. "He was seen being dug out of the rubble and wasn't able to breathe."
Saddam was unharmed, probably because he had never been there, but 18 Iraqi civilians were dead. One US military leader defended the attacks, claiming they showed "US resolve and capabilities".
Mr Cheney was back in Baghdad this week, five years later almost to the day, to announce that there has been "phenomenal" improvements in Iraqi security. Within hours, a woman suicide bomber blew herself up in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, killing at least 40 and wounding 50 people. Often it is difficult to know where the self-deception ends and the deliberate mendacity begins....
Cockburn offers a more recent example to show that the same carnival of deceit that marked the war's beginning is still going on:
On 1 February this year, two suicide bombers, said to be female, blew themselves up in two pet markets in predominantly Shia areas of Baghdad, al Ghazil and al-Jadida, and killed 99 people. Iraqi government officials immediately said the bombers had the chromosonal disorder Down's syndrome, which they could tell this from looking at the severed heads of the bombers. Sadly, horrific bombings in Iraq are so common that they no longer generate much media interest abroad. It was the Down's syndrome angle which made the story front-page news. It showed al-Qa'ida in Iraq was even more inhumanly evil than one had supposed (if that were possible) and it meant, so Iraqi officials said, that al-Qa'ida was running out of volunteers.And of course, it is not only people in Baghdad who don't care about the fate of Aboub and the captive beggars -- whose confusion and torment in the torture chambers of our proteges can only be imagined. It is the American political and media establishments -- and the American people collectively -- who do not care and do not want to know about the individual lives being crushed in their names.
The Times splashed on it under the headline, "Down's syndrome bombers kill 91". The story stated firmly that "explosives strapped to two women with Down's syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets". Other papers, including The Independent, felt the story had a highly suspicious smell to it. How much could really be told about the mental condition of a woman from a human head shattered by a powerful bomb? Reliable eyewitnesses in suicide bombings are difficult to find because anybody standing close to the bomber is likely to be dead or in hospital.
The US military later supported the Iraqi claim that the bombers had Down's syndrome. On 10 February, they arrested Dr Sahi Aboub, the acting director of the al Rashad mental hospital in east Baghdad, alleging that he had provided mental patients for use by al-Qa'ida. The Iraqi Interior Ministry started rounding up beggars and mentally disturbed people on the grounds that they might be potential bombers.
But on 21 February, an American military spokes-man said there was no evidence the bombers had Down's. Adel Mohsin, a senior official at the Health Ministry in Baghdad, poured scorn on the idea that Dr Aboub could have done business with the Sunni fanatics of al-Qa'ida because he was a Shia and had only been in the job a few weeks.
A second doctor, who did not want to give his name, pointed out that al Rashad hospital is run by the fundamentalist Shia Mehdi Army and asked: "How would it be possible for al-Qa'ida to get in there?"
Few people in Baghdad now care about the exact circumstances of the bird market bombings apart from Dr Aboub, who is still in jail, and the mentally disturbed beggars who were incarcerated.
Seamus Milne takes up this theme of neglect -- where, as he puts it, the vast suffering in Iraq "has been somehow normalised as a kind of background noise" -- in his excellent summation in Thursday's Guardian:
The unprovoked aggression launched by the US and Britain against Iraq five years ago today has already gone down across the world as, to borrow the words of President Roosevelt, "a day which will live in infamy". Iraqis were promised freedom, democracy and prosperity. Instead...they have seen the physical and social destruction of their country, mass killing, tens of thousands thrown into jail without trial, rampant torture, an epidemic of sectarian terror attacks, pauperisation, and the complete breakdown of basic services and supplies....and has already been hired to teach religion at Yale University, as we noted recently. No doubt we'll also see George Bush on that gilded gospel road next year, talking of his deep, abiding religious faith while filling his trousers with "appearance fee" loot, like Blair and Bill Clinton -- that "unindicted co-conspirator" whose policies did so much to lay the groundwork for the present catastrophe, from his accelerated privatization of the military (Clinton gave billions to Halliburton); to his waging of undeclared, unsanctioned war against Serbia (where he deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure in blatant contravention of international law); to his continuation of genocidal sanctions on the Iraqi people, which weakened Iraqi society to the breaking point and accelerated the rise of religious extremism and sectarianism; to the continual bombing raids he conducted against Iraq, including two major air campaigns, again inflicting many civilian casualties; and, last but by no means least, his quashing of several investigations into the crimes of George H.W. Bush and his minions, which allowed the political rehabilitation of this sinister faction and kept them close enough to the center of power -- and sanitized enough in the public eye -- to be able to cheat their way into office after losing a close vote in 2000.
...After five years of occupation, Iraq is ranked as the most violent and dangerous place in the world by an Economist Intelligence Unit index. Two million refugees have fled the country as a result, while a further 2 million have been driven from their homes inside Iraq. This has become the greatest humanitarian crisis on the planet.
In the western world, far from the scene of the unfolding catastrophe, such suffering has been somehow normalised as a kind of background noise. But the impact on the aggressor states, both at home and abroad, has only begun to be felt: not only in the predicted terrorist blowback finally acknowledged by Tony Blair last year, but in a profound domestic political alienation, as well as a loss of standing and credibility across the globe. How can anyone take seriously, for example, US or British leaders lecturing China about Tibet, Russia about Chechnya, or Sudan about Darfur, when they have triggered and presided over such an orgy of killing, collective punishment, prisoner abuse and ethnic cleansing?
Given that the invasion of Iraq was regarded as illegal by the majority of the UN security council, its secretary general, and the overwhelming weight of international legal opinion, it must by the same token be seen as a war crime: what the Nuremberg tribunal deemed the "supreme international crime" of aggression. If it weren't for the fact that there is not the remotest prospect of any mechanism to apply international law to powerful states, Bush and Blair would be in the dock at the Hague. As it is, the only Briton to be found guilty of a war crime in Iraq has been corporal Donald Payne, convicted of inhumane treatment of detainees in Basra -- while the man who sent him there is preposterously touted as a future president of the European Union....
This is a woeful record indeed -- and the fifth anniversary of the criminal invasion of Iraq is just a small milestone that we are speeding past on a long journey into darkness. As an American, one can only echo the words of Senator Robert Byrd five years ago, when this flawed and conflicted man rose as one of the very few in the entire political establishment to condemn Bush's Hitlerian action: "Today, I weep for my country."
Filed under
Chris Floyd,
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad,
Iraq,
Patrick Cockburn,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, March 20, 2008
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
Toronto Star : Toronto man haunted by U.S. jail nightmares
Friday, February 29, 2008
Toronto man haunted by U.S. jail nightmares
Former Algerian air force lieutenant jailed for 5 years says Canada's decision to transfer him to the United States after Sept. 11 attacks was illegal
Isabel Teotonio | Staff reporter | February 29, 2008
Benamar Benatta rarely sleeps more than three or four hours a night.
The 33-year-old former Algerian air force lieutenant still spends nights wondering why Canadian officials transported him across the border on Sept. 12, 2001 then handed him to American authorities. And, of course, there are recurring nightmares of five years spent in U.S. jails, despite being cleared by the FBI in November 2001 of having any links to the 9/11 attacks.
The Toronto man can still hear the taunts from jail guards who called him a terrorist; can still hear the jingle of keys as guards entered his cell every half-hour, waking him from a fitful slumber.
"I'm not the same person I used to be before Sept. 12, who was full of life and full of spirit," said Benatta, whose feet and hands bear scars from his time in jail. "It's like they've marked me for the rest of my life. It wasn't only five years of detention – what they did to me will hurt me the rest of my life," said Benatta, who was granted refugee status in November.
Benatta's story became a minor cause celebre in the U.S., but his fight to have the Canadian government probe his case, isn't well-known north of the border. That's why he is scheduled to speak tonight at the Noor Cultural Centre.
"He is the first and only known case of Canada effecting an extraordinary rendition – an illegal transfer of a person from one legal jurisdiction to another outside the scope of law," said Benatta's lawyer Nicole Chrolavicius.
A Canada Border Services Agency spokesperson refused to comment yesterday, saying the government is reviewing the allegations in a lawsuit filed by Benatta.
Benatta was raised in a middle-class family in Algeria, the youngest of 10 children. He trained as an aeronautical engineer and joined the air force in 1992, the same year the military-backed government cancelled elections to keep the opposition Islamic party from power. Conflict engulfed the nation in a civil war marked by atrocities.
Benatta watched the military crackdown and refused to participate in some acts, which landed him in prison. He also received death threats from Islamic fighters.
In December 2000, he and other Algerian officers went to the U.S. to train in aircraft technology. But when his six-month visa expired, he stayed illegally.
On Sept. 5, 2001, he decided to seek asylum in Canada. Officials spotted his false identification and arrested him. On Sept. 12 he was handed over to the Americans, but he unaware of what had happened the previous day.
Benatta and his lawyer say this was an illegal transfer. There has been suggestion by the Canadian government he had withdrawn his asylum bid and returned voluntarily but no paperwork has been produced to support that claim.
Benatta was held in jail under abusive conditions documented in U.S. court filings. Although he was cleared of terror links two months later, he wasn't told, or given access to counsel, until April 2002.
He was then transferred to another prison on charges of having carried fraudulent papers. A federal judge later called the case a "sham."
Benatta was released in summer 2006 when Canada issued him a temporary residency permit, allowing him to claim refugee status, which was granted because it was determined he would be in danger if he returned to Algeria.
"I'm very disappointed about (the government's) reaction," said Benatta, who recently landed a job and got off social assistance. "When they allowed me to return, I thought they'd accept their mistake and say `Sorry.' Maybe for them it means nothing, but for someone who has been subjected to torture.... It means a lot."
Discussion starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Noor Cultural Centre. Admission: $5.
Former Algerian air force lieutenant jailed for 5 years says Canada's decision to transfer him to the United States after Sept. 11 attacks was illegal
Isabel Teotonio | Staff reporter | February 29, 2008
Benamar Benatta rarely sleeps more than three or four hours a night.
The 33-year-old former Algerian air force lieutenant still spends nights wondering why Canadian officials transported him across the border on Sept. 12, 2001 then handed him to American authorities. And, of course, there are recurring nightmares of five years spent in U.S. jails, despite being cleared by the FBI in November 2001 of having any links to the 9/11 attacks.
The Toronto man can still hear the taunts from jail guards who called him a terrorist; can still hear the jingle of keys as guards entered his cell every half-hour, waking him from a fitful slumber.
"I'm not the same person I used to be before Sept. 12, who was full of life and full of spirit," said Benatta, whose feet and hands bear scars from his time in jail. "It's like they've marked me for the rest of my life. It wasn't only five years of detention – what they did to me will hurt me the rest of my life," said Benatta, who was granted refugee status in November.
Benatta's story became a minor cause celebre in the U.S., but his fight to have the Canadian government probe his case, isn't well-known north of the border. That's why he is scheduled to speak tonight at the Noor Cultural Centre.
"He is the first and only known case of Canada effecting an extraordinary rendition – an illegal transfer of a person from one legal jurisdiction to another outside the scope of law," said Benatta's lawyer Nicole Chrolavicius.
A Canada Border Services Agency spokesperson refused to comment yesterday, saying the government is reviewing the allegations in a lawsuit filed by Benatta.
Benatta was raised in a middle-class family in Algeria, the youngest of 10 children. He trained as an aeronautical engineer and joined the air force in 1992, the same year the military-backed government cancelled elections to keep the opposition Islamic party from power. Conflict engulfed the nation in a civil war marked by atrocities.
Benatta watched the military crackdown and refused to participate in some acts, which landed him in prison. He also received death threats from Islamic fighters.
In December 2000, he and other Algerian officers went to the U.S. to train in aircraft technology. But when his six-month visa expired, he stayed illegally.
On Sept. 5, 2001, he decided to seek asylum in Canada. Officials spotted his false identification and arrested him. On Sept. 12 he was handed over to the Americans, but he unaware of what had happened the previous day.
Benatta and his lawyer say this was an illegal transfer. There has been suggestion by the Canadian government he had withdrawn his asylum bid and returned voluntarily but no paperwork has been produced to support that claim.
Benatta was held in jail under abusive conditions documented in U.S. court filings. Although he was cleared of terror links two months later, he wasn't told, or given access to counsel, until April 2002.
He was then transferred to another prison on charges of having carried fraudulent papers. A federal judge later called the case a "sham."
Benatta was released in summer 2006 when Canada issued him a temporary residency permit, allowing him to claim refugee status, which was granted because it was determined he would be in danger if he returned to Algeria.
"I'm very disappointed about (the government's) reaction," said Benatta, who recently landed a job and got off social assistance. "When they allowed me to return, I thought they'd accept their mistake and say `Sorry.' Maybe for them it means nothing, but for someone who has been subjected to torture.... It means a lot."
Discussion starts at 7:30 p.m. at the Noor Cultural Centre. Admission: $5.
Filed under
Benamar Benatta,
extraordinary rendition,
lawyers,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, February 29, 2008
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
Washington Post : For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion
Friday, December 21, 2007
For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion
By Scott Wilson | Washington Post Foreign Service | December 20, 2007
KARMIEL, Israel -- Fatina and Ahmad Zubeidat, young Arab citizens of Israel, met on the first day of class at the prestigious Bezalel arts and architecture academy in Jerusalem. Married last year, the couple rents an airy house here in the Galilee filled with stylish furniture and other modern grace notes.
But this is not where they wanted to live. They had hoped to be in Rakefet, a nearby town where 150 Jewish families live on state land close to the mall project Ahmad is building. After months of interviews and testing, the town's admission committee rejected the Arab couple on the grounds of "social incompatibility."
They petitioned Israel's high court to end such screening, claiming discrimination, a charge town officials are challenging.
"We can't just be good citizens," said Fatina, 27, who is expecting the couple's first child. "If they won't develop our villages, then we will choose where we want to live. The problem lies not with us, but with Jewish society that does not accept the other."
The Zubeidats are players in a wider ethnic clash unfolding in the Galilee, a northern region where Arabs, those who remained in Israel after its creation in 1948 and their descendants, outnumber Jews. Israel's policies have deepened the gulf between Arab and Jewish citizens in recent years, through concrete walls, laws that favor Jews, and political proposals that place the Arab minority outside national life.
This process of separation within Israel's original boundaries mirrors in many ways the broader one taking place between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories.
With most of Israel's land controlled by a government agency, Israeli Arabs have long had more trouble acquiring property than Jews, who outnumber them five to one in a population of about 6.5 million people. In response, Arab lawmakers joined a Jewish parliamentary majority this year in endorsing the construction of a new Arab city in the Galilee, where demographic rivalry and ethnic separation are most pronounced. Arabs say it will be the first city built on their behalf since the state's founding.
But some Jewish political leaders have suggested that Israel's Arabs, who commonly refer to themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, should eventually live in a future Palestinian state, the subject of peace negotiations inaugurated last month in Annapolis, Md. Israel's foreign minister and lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, said before the meeting that such a state would "be the national answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different refugee camps or in Israel."
Arabs and Jews study in separate schools in Israel -- the Arab system receives fewer resources -- and learn Israeli history in different ways. Israel's Jewish education minister, Yuli Tamir, ordered this year that Arab third-grade textbooks note that Arab citizens call Israel's 1948 War of Independence "the catastrophe." Many Jewish lawmakers reacted with scorn.
Except for a relatively small Druze population, Arabs are excluded also from military service mandatory for all but ultra-Orthodox Jews, an essential shared experience of Israeli life and a traditional training ground for future political leaders. Arab lawmakers have lined up now against a new proposal for Arabs to perform "national service" in lieu of time in the army, an institution they hold responsible for enforcing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
"We have lost the Arab citizens of Israel," said Amir Sheleg, 63, who is head of security for the Jewish community of Nir Zevi on Israel's coastal plain. "They no longer want to be a part of the state, and I am sorry for it."
Sheleg, burly and bald, patrolled in a black pickup truck along a concrete wall that rises along the town's edge. The 15-foot-high barrier, funded by the government, divides the leafy streets of Nir Zevi from the adjacent Arab community of Lod. Rising crime, he said, prompted his town to begin building the wall four years ago.
"It only adds hatred," said Rifat Iliatim, 39, an Arab resident of Lod who sells horses for a living. "All our lives we lived together and there was respect on both sides. Do they want this part of Israel to be like Jerusalem or Gaza where Jews and Arabs are separate?"
ACRE
Acre is a city of 52,000 Arab and Jewish citizens, many living in mixed neighborhoods along a sweep of Mediterranean coast.
Arabs dominate the seaside Old City, a U.N. World Heritage Site of crenellated stone walls possessed over the centuries by Greeks, Egyptians and Crusader kings. A single crowded high school just outside the ancient walls serves the entire Arab population, 27 percent of Acre's total. The city's five mosques, including el-Jazzar, the second largest in Israel and the territories after al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, are also concentrated in the area.
Jews live in the newer, outlying neighborhoods that ring the Old City. For more than two decades, Jews rising into the middle class left the older neighborhoods and Arabs filled in behind them.
"This is a mixed city and that's a fact," said Ohad Segev, Acre's Jewish director general, who believes the two groups should mix as little as possible. "Just as I wouldn't allow a yeshiva to open in the Old City, I wouldn't allow a mosque to open in the new one."
In the past year, conflict between Arabs and Jews -- over business hours, the right to open mosques, and an increasing Jewish presence in Arab-majority areas -- has flashed through neighborhoods running between the two largely ethnically distinct parts of the city.
Yeshiva Hesder-Acco is dwarfed by decrepit apartment buildings with laundry hanging from balconies. Once populated by new Jewish immigrants, the apartments are filled now by Arabs. Young girls walk the streets in head scarves. Arab boys play soccer on the asphalt court next to the yeshiva.
"It's just background noise, part of the scenery," said Mordechai Behar, a 22-year-old yeshiva student, referring to his Arab neighbors. "We try not to interact with them."
Yossi Stern, a 35-year-old rabbi, runs the yeshiva with a bustling energy. He arrived in 2001 from the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, one of the earliest and most radical in the territories, where he was a teacher.
His move reflected a shift in his focus from settling the West Bank to promoting a larger and more politically aware Jewish majority within Israel's original boundaries. He has grown the yeshiva from 20 to 120 students since then.
"Inside the Green Line, people have not awakened to their role of the last 100 years," Stern said, referring to the 1949 armistice line that marked Israel's boundary until it seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war. "If we fall asleep here, we will wake up to an Arab majority."
His students volunteer in public schools and direct tours of the Old City, where a state-run development company is buying Arab property and selling it to Jewish businessmen.
Stern works with the city government, led by a Jewish mayor, on projects designed to attract Jews to Acre, including a recently approved housing development designated for Jewish military families. Built on state land, the development will include a new, 350-student yeshiva that Stern advertises as "the center for Jewish identity in the Galilee."
"We're not trying to build a settlement in this city," he said. "Here we're mature enough to see this as a long process."
But Ahmad Odeh, an Arab member of the city council, calls Stern precisely that -- "a settler" trying to make Arab neighborhoods more Jewish. Odeh's family fled from the Galilee village of Shaab during the 1948 war, eventually settling in a neighborhood not far from Stern's yeshiva. Odeh has sued the Jewish-majority council successfully six times for violating Arab rights to education and property.
Odeh, a slight, wiry man with spiky hair, has been lobbying the council to reopen a mosque outside the Old City that the government closed decades ago. It sits among some of the city's more than 50 synagogues.
Because the single Arab high school is overcrowded, Odeh's eldest daughter commutes to one in a village 45 minutes from town, reversing the rural-to-urban migration patterns of recent decades.
"This is all part of the project to Judaize the Galilee," said Odeh, 48. "We want to be partners in our city."
KARMIEL
This hilltop community with streets lined by date palms and split by lush grassy medians emerged in the 1960s as a Zionist response to the large Arab population in the Galilee. The Zubeidats are among a tiny fraction of Arabs who live here.
The couple considered building a home in Sakhnin, a nearby Arab town. But as with many Arab towns and villages, its public services pale next to those of Jewish ones. The prospects appeared better in Rakefet, and they applied to live there after marrying.
The Israel Land Administration controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, including the hilltop where Rakefet sits. The government agency has a say in who is allowed to live in such communities with a representative on the local "absorption committees" that weigh the applications.
For the Zubeidats, who speak Hebrew and Arabic fluently, the months-long process began in the summer of 2006. It included a series of interviews and tests, some taken with the dozen or so Jewish applicants also seeking to move in.
"All the questions had to do with how we would integrate into the community," Fatina said. "We have many, many Jewish friends. We spend our holidays with them, and they do the same. We're not from outer space, we're from here."
The rejection letter followed a conversation the Zubeidats had with an official from the Misgav Regional Council, which oversees Rakefet and dozens of other nearby towns. He told them, Fatina recalled, that although they were "very nice people," he would have to begin marketing Rakefet as a "mixed community" to possible buyers in Tel Aviv if they moved in. The designation would hurt sales.
"Obviously, this whole process was designed to push us back to Sakhnin," Ahmad said. "And the way these Arab towns are now, it's like a ghetto."
Maya Tsaban, a spokeswoman for the regional council that oversees Rakefet, said, "This decision was based on rules we didn't make," referring to regulations established by national government agencies. She declined to comment further.
The Israel Land Administration, which set the selection criteria, rejected the Zubeidats' appeal this year. An agency spokeswoman, Ortal Tzabar, said, "One aspect taken into consideration in deciding whether to accept someone is the homogeneity of the community."
The houses of Rakefet are set along steep, curving streets lined with pines and cedar. Nadav Garmi, a 35-year-old engineer, is building a home there. He makes a short drive each day from his neighboring community -- also populated only by Jews -- that falls under the same regional council.
"I'm very left-wing, but I think Arabs should live in one place, ultra-Orthodox Jews in one place, secular Jews in one place and so on," Garmi said. "If you want a good neighbor, you have to have a place for everybody. It's best not to mix too much."
By Scott Wilson | Washington Post Foreign Service | December 20, 2007
KARMIEL, Israel -- Fatina and Ahmad Zubeidat, young Arab citizens of Israel, met on the first day of class at the prestigious Bezalel arts and architecture academy in Jerusalem. Married last year, the couple rents an airy house here in the Galilee filled with stylish furniture and other modern grace notes.
But this is not where they wanted to live. They had hoped to be in Rakefet, a nearby town where 150 Jewish families live on state land close to the mall project Ahmad is building. After months of interviews and testing, the town's admission committee rejected the Arab couple on the grounds of "social incompatibility."
They petitioned Israel's high court to end such screening, claiming discrimination, a charge town officials are challenging.
"We can't just be good citizens," said Fatina, 27, who is expecting the couple's first child. "If they won't develop our villages, then we will choose where we want to live. The problem lies not with us, but with Jewish society that does not accept the other."
The Zubeidats are players in a wider ethnic clash unfolding in the Galilee, a northern region where Arabs, those who remained in Israel after its creation in 1948 and their descendants, outnumber Jews. Israel's policies have deepened the gulf between Arab and Jewish citizens in recent years, through concrete walls, laws that favor Jews, and political proposals that place the Arab minority outside national life.
This process of separation within Israel's original boundaries mirrors in many ways the broader one taking place between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories.
With most of Israel's land controlled by a government agency, Israeli Arabs have long had more trouble acquiring property than Jews, who outnumber them five to one in a population of about 6.5 million people. In response, Arab lawmakers joined a Jewish parliamentary majority this year in endorsing the construction of a new Arab city in the Galilee, where demographic rivalry and ethnic separation are most pronounced. Arabs say it will be the first city built on their behalf since the state's founding.
But some Jewish political leaders have suggested that Israel's Arabs, who commonly refer to themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, should eventually live in a future Palestinian state, the subject of peace negotiations inaugurated last month in Annapolis, Md. Israel's foreign minister and lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, said before the meeting that such a state would "be the national answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different refugee camps or in Israel."
Arabs and Jews study in separate schools in Israel -- the Arab system receives fewer resources -- and learn Israeli history in different ways. Israel's Jewish education minister, Yuli Tamir, ordered this year that Arab third-grade textbooks note that Arab citizens call Israel's 1948 War of Independence "the catastrophe." Many Jewish lawmakers reacted with scorn.
Except for a relatively small Druze population, Arabs are excluded also from military service mandatory for all but ultra-Orthodox Jews, an essential shared experience of Israeli life and a traditional training ground for future political leaders. Arab lawmakers have lined up now against a new proposal for Arabs to perform "national service" in lieu of time in the army, an institution they hold responsible for enforcing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
"We have lost the Arab citizens of Israel," said Amir Sheleg, 63, who is head of security for the Jewish community of Nir Zevi on Israel's coastal plain. "They no longer want to be a part of the state, and I am sorry for it."
Sheleg, burly and bald, patrolled in a black pickup truck along a concrete wall that rises along the town's edge. The 15-foot-high barrier, funded by the government, divides the leafy streets of Nir Zevi from the adjacent Arab community of Lod. Rising crime, he said, prompted his town to begin building the wall four years ago.
"It only adds hatred," said Rifat Iliatim, 39, an Arab resident of Lod who sells horses for a living. "All our lives we lived together and there was respect on both sides. Do they want this part of Israel to be like Jerusalem or Gaza where Jews and Arabs are separate?"
ACRE
Acre is a city of 52,000 Arab and Jewish citizens, many living in mixed neighborhoods along a sweep of Mediterranean coast.
Arabs dominate the seaside Old City, a U.N. World Heritage Site of crenellated stone walls possessed over the centuries by Greeks, Egyptians and Crusader kings. A single crowded high school just outside the ancient walls serves the entire Arab population, 27 percent of Acre's total. The city's five mosques, including el-Jazzar, the second largest in Israel and the territories after al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, are also concentrated in the area.
Jews live in the newer, outlying neighborhoods that ring the Old City. For more than two decades, Jews rising into the middle class left the older neighborhoods and Arabs filled in behind them.
"This is a mixed city and that's a fact," said Ohad Segev, Acre's Jewish director general, who believes the two groups should mix as little as possible. "Just as I wouldn't allow a yeshiva to open in the Old City, I wouldn't allow a mosque to open in the new one."
In the past year, conflict between Arabs and Jews -- over business hours, the right to open mosques, and an increasing Jewish presence in Arab-majority areas -- has flashed through neighborhoods running between the two largely ethnically distinct parts of the city.
Yeshiva Hesder-Acco is dwarfed by decrepit apartment buildings with laundry hanging from balconies. Once populated by new Jewish immigrants, the apartments are filled now by Arabs. Young girls walk the streets in head scarves. Arab boys play soccer on the asphalt court next to the yeshiva.
"It's just background noise, part of the scenery," said Mordechai Behar, a 22-year-old yeshiva student, referring to his Arab neighbors. "We try not to interact with them."
Yossi Stern, a 35-year-old rabbi, runs the yeshiva with a bustling energy. He arrived in 2001 from the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, one of the earliest and most radical in the territories, where he was a teacher.
His move reflected a shift in his focus from settling the West Bank to promoting a larger and more politically aware Jewish majority within Israel's original boundaries. He has grown the yeshiva from 20 to 120 students since then.
"Inside the Green Line, people have not awakened to their role of the last 100 years," Stern said, referring to the 1949 armistice line that marked Israel's boundary until it seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war. "If we fall asleep here, we will wake up to an Arab majority."
His students volunteer in public schools and direct tours of the Old City, where a state-run development company is buying Arab property and selling it to Jewish businessmen.
Stern works with the city government, led by a Jewish mayor, on projects designed to attract Jews to Acre, including a recently approved housing development designated for Jewish military families. Built on state land, the development will include a new, 350-student yeshiva that Stern advertises as "the center for Jewish identity in the Galilee."
"We're not trying to build a settlement in this city," he said. "Here we're mature enough to see this as a long process."
But Ahmad Odeh, an Arab member of the city council, calls Stern precisely that -- "a settler" trying to make Arab neighborhoods more Jewish. Odeh's family fled from the Galilee village of Shaab during the 1948 war, eventually settling in a neighborhood not far from Stern's yeshiva. Odeh has sued the Jewish-majority council successfully six times for violating Arab rights to education and property.
Odeh, a slight, wiry man with spiky hair, has been lobbying the council to reopen a mosque outside the Old City that the government closed decades ago. It sits among some of the city's more than 50 synagogues.
Because the single Arab high school is overcrowded, Odeh's eldest daughter commutes to one in a village 45 minutes from town, reversing the rural-to-urban migration patterns of recent decades.
"This is all part of the project to Judaize the Galilee," said Odeh, 48. "We want to be partners in our city."
KARMIEL
This hilltop community with streets lined by date palms and split by lush grassy medians emerged in the 1960s as a Zionist response to the large Arab population in the Galilee. The Zubeidats are among a tiny fraction of Arabs who live here.
The couple considered building a home in Sakhnin, a nearby Arab town. But as with many Arab towns and villages, its public services pale next to those of Jewish ones. The prospects appeared better in Rakefet, and they applied to live there after marrying.
The Israel Land Administration controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, including the hilltop where Rakefet sits. The government agency has a say in who is allowed to live in such communities with a representative on the local "absorption committees" that weigh the applications.
For the Zubeidats, who speak Hebrew and Arabic fluently, the months-long process began in the summer of 2006. It included a series of interviews and tests, some taken with the dozen or so Jewish applicants also seeking to move in.
"All the questions had to do with how we would integrate into the community," Fatina said. "We have many, many Jewish friends. We spend our holidays with them, and they do the same. We're not from outer space, we're from here."
The rejection letter followed a conversation the Zubeidats had with an official from the Misgav Regional Council, which oversees Rakefet and dozens of other nearby towns. He told them, Fatina recalled, that although they were "very nice people," he would have to begin marketing Rakefet as a "mixed community" to possible buyers in Tel Aviv if they moved in. The designation would hurt sales.
"Obviously, this whole process was designed to push us back to Sakhnin," Ahmad said. "And the way these Arab towns are now, it's like a ghetto."
Maya Tsaban, a spokeswoman for the regional council that oversees Rakefet, said, "This decision was based on rules we didn't make," referring to regulations established by national government agencies. She declined to comment further.
The Israel Land Administration, which set the selection criteria, rejected the Zubeidats' appeal this year. An agency spokeswoman, Ortal Tzabar, said, "One aspect taken into consideration in deciding whether to accept someone is the homogeneity of the community."
The houses of Rakefet are set along steep, curving streets lined with pines and cedar. Nadav Garmi, a 35-year-old engineer, is building a home there. He makes a short drive each day from his neighboring community -- also populated only by Jews -- that falls under the same regional council.
"I'm very left-wing, but I think Arabs should live in one place, ultra-Orthodox Jews in one place, secular Jews in one place and so on," Garmi said. "If you want a good neighbor, you have to have a place for everybody. It's best not to mix too much."
NYT : For Musharraf, Reduced Power as the President
Thursday, November 29, 2007
For Musharraf, Reduced Power as the President
By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ | November 29, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 28 — A day after resigning as army chief, Pervez Musharraf will be sworn in as a civilian president on Thursday, leaving him with vastly reduced powers and Washington with a far more complex Pakistan to deal with in its fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Bowing reluctantly to pressure at home and abroad, Mr. Musharraf, 64, relinquished his military role in a somber ceremony on Wednesday, ending eight years of military rule. He turned over control of the army to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, 55, a former head of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.
The move sets up the potential of competing power centers in Pakistan, with an army chief separate from the president and the recent return from exile of the country’s two main opposition leaders. That is likely to complicate Bush administration antiterrorism policy here, something officials in Washington were hoping to avoid, and one reason they supported Mr. Musharraf for so long.
Senior army commanders grumbled increasingly in recent months that Mr. Musharraf was so engrossed in his own political survival that he had become distracted from battling the country’s spreading insurgency, Western military officials said.
Though finally stepping down as army chief, he is likely to retain much of his old power as a civilian president, fortified by his emergency decree on Nov. 3, and loyalists he chose at the top of the military, according to Pakistani officials and analysts.
But in fairly short order, Mr. Musharraf, who plunged the nation into political turmoil with his emergency decree and has been a sometimes frustrating partner in Washington’s fight against terrorism, will become a diminished figure, they said, a civilian president in a country where traditionally the power lies with an elected prime minister, or the military chiefs who have overthrown them. Mr. Musharraf came to power in such a coup.
Though General Kayani is considered loyal to the president, the real levers of power will pass to him, and he is believed to favor removing the army from the center of politics, they said. “Kayani is loyal to Musharraf, but also to Pakistan,” one Western military official said.
And as much as Washington has supported Mr. Musharraf, having a chief of the army on the job full time is a change likely to be welcomed. Bush administration officials have already praised General Kayani as someone they can work with.
General Kayani, an infantry commander and a graduate of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, which he attended in 1987 and 1988, has been described by Western diplomats and military officials as well liked and by far Pakistan’s most capable commander.
He has already played a prominent role in cooperating with the United States. He was promoted to full general and made vice chief of Army Staff in October. He immediately visited units serving on the front lines in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and said that sorting out the difficulties plaguing western Pakistan was a priority, a Western military official said.
Even with his new oath of office, Mr. Musharraf will confront considerable political challenges. Before giving up his army post, he transferred the power to lift the de facto martial law to the presidency in a decree last week, and so any decision to lift it remains firmly in his hands.
He continues under intense pressure to rescind the decree he used to suspend the Constitution and appoint a new Supreme Court. The decree has been criticized by opponents and Western diplomats as a blatant move to have his recent election as president confirmed.
Mr. Musharraf is also under pressure to free the senior lawyers and judges who declared his emergency decree illegal and remain under house arrest. Once freed, they are likely to resume their campaign against him.
Not least, with parliamentary elections set for Jan. 8, he will also have to deal with two political opponents who are freshly back from exile, the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the man he overthrew in a coup in 1999.
Both politicians have called for Mr. Musharraf’s resignation and for changes in the Constitution to curb the president’s powers over Parliament. As leaders of Pakistan’s largest political parties, either could head the next government as prime minister, perpetuating their power struggles with Mr. Musharraf as president.
While the military under General Kayani is likely to support Mr. Musharraf as president, it is unlikely to intervene to save him in further political tests of will, said a former general and political analyst, Talat Masood.
One indication of the mood is a letter that 20 former generals, air marshals and admirals, including Mr. Masood, sent this week to President Musharraf calling on him to resign as head of state as well as chief of the army.
They called on him to lift the emergency and restore the Constitution, withdraw curbs on the news media and release political prisoners. Imposing the emergency as chief of army staff was bringing the armed forces into disrepute, they said.
“The actions he is taking are really detrimental to the state,” Mr. Masood said. They had encouraged other countries to interfere in Pakistan’s affairs, specifically Saudi Arabia and the United States, in a way they never had before, and caused Pakistan to lose international respect, he said. He also criticized Mr. Musharraf for suggesting that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would not be safe if he were not in power, which he said was simply untrue.
One of the hardest things for Mr. Musharraf now may be to stop giving the commands.
“He’s the one who wants to sit in the driving seat,” said Pervaiz Elahi, who served as chief minister of the Punjab under General Musharraf. “As commander in chief and president, I still see him as controlling the army for five years,” he said.
He added that he did not think General Kayani would seek to change anything. “Kayani is a person who just goes by the book,” he said.
Though no longer in control of the army, Mr. Musharraf will retain some levers of influence within the military and the intelligence services, like his personal relationship with Gen. Nadeem Taj, the head of the Inter-Intelligence Services, officials said.
Yet other officials said that even with the extra powers given to the president in recent years, such as chairing the National Security Council, real power resides with the army chief. Unlike the American system, a civilian president in Pakistan is titular head of the armed forces.
“By the law of inertia he will continue to have some hold of the army,” said I. A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. But he predicted that during the coming months Mr. Musharraf’s influence would diminish. “He will still have ears in the army, but he will not be able to dictate to them,” Mr. Rehman said.
Much depends on who forms a government after parliamentary elections, because military appointments, among other things, technically reside with the prime minister, said Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times.
In a recent interview, Mr. Musharraf indicated that he hoped his supporters in the previous governing coalition would be returned with a majority again, but some of those members complain that his own mistakes during the past nine months have damaged their chances at the polls.
A series of high-handed actions turned Mr. Musharraf from a popular domestic figure and a trophy of sorts for Washington — he signed up to the fight against terrorism immediately after 9/11 — to an embattled leader at home and an increasing embarrassment for the Bush administration.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” President Bush said he appreciated that Mr. Musharraf had “kept his word” to step down as military chief.
“I also hope that he enhances Pakistani democracy, and taking off his uniform is a strong first step,” he said. “And having elections that are out from underneath the emergency law would be a clear signal that he has put Pakistan back on the road.”
Mr. Musharraf’s friends and critics alike point to his decision to dismiss the chief justice of the former Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in early March as his biggest blunder, one that inexorably led to the imposition of emergency rule on Nov. 3.
“He lost his head and tried to fire the chief justice,” said Humayun Gauhar, a friend and the ghostwriter of Mr. Musharraf’s memoir, “In the Line of Fire.”
Mr. Musharraf was prompted by his fear that the increasingly independent court under Justice Chaudhry would eventually rule against him in his effort to be re-elected as president while he remained as army chief, Mr. Gauhar said.
Because of his military mind-set, Mr. Musharraf failed to calculate, Mr. Gauhar said, that the chief justice would mount a popular movement of lawyers against Mr. Musharraf.
“Asking the chief justice to retire was a command,” Mr. Gauhar said. “I don’t think the refusal was ever in his scheme. A civilian would always keep that possibility in mind.”
The firing of the chief justice brought out a latent public dissatisfaction with military rule. Mr. Musharraf’s refusal to give up his military post became the focus of the opposition and obscured many of his earlier achievements, his supporters said.
When he seized power in 1999 and ousted Mr. Sharif, the former prime minister who returned to Pakistan last weekend, Mr. Musharraf was seen as a welcome newcomer who had the ability to clean up the pervasive corruption in Pakistan’s politics. He described himself as a modernizer. He encouraged the opening of independent television stations, and freed up the statist economy.
Born in India in 1943, he came to Pakistan as a refugee at partition in 1947. That status made him an outsider to the feudal society that had produced most of the nation’s rulers.
In the beginning of his rule, he moved swiftly against corruption, said Farook Adam Khan, who served then as prosecutor general for the National Accountability Bureau. But after a year, the general switched gears, Mr. Khan said, stopped pursuing corruption cases and acquiesced to the religious parties in his coalition over various efforts at reforms.
Mr. Musharraf’s supporters say that removing his uniform may come just in time for the president to regain some of his standing.
“As a president without uniform he will help us in the coming elections,” said Mr. Elahi, the former minister who is touted as a likely prime minister if his pro-Musharraf party retains majority.
Carlotta Gall reported from Lahore. Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
By CARLOTTA GALL and JANE PERLEZ | November 29, 2007
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 28 — A day after resigning as army chief, Pervez Musharraf will be sworn in as a civilian president on Thursday, leaving him with vastly reduced powers and Washington with a far more complex Pakistan to deal with in its fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Bowing reluctantly to pressure at home and abroad, Mr. Musharraf, 64, relinquished his military role in a somber ceremony on Wednesday, ending eight years of military rule. He turned over control of the army to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, 55, a former head of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.
The move sets up the potential of competing power centers in Pakistan, with an army chief separate from the president and the recent return from exile of the country’s two main opposition leaders. That is likely to complicate Bush administration antiterrorism policy here, something officials in Washington were hoping to avoid, and one reason they supported Mr. Musharraf for so long.
Senior army commanders grumbled increasingly in recent months that Mr. Musharraf was so engrossed in his own political survival that he had become distracted from battling the country’s spreading insurgency, Western military officials said.
Though finally stepping down as army chief, he is likely to retain much of his old power as a civilian president, fortified by his emergency decree on Nov. 3, and loyalists he chose at the top of the military, according to Pakistani officials and analysts.
But in fairly short order, Mr. Musharraf, who plunged the nation into political turmoil with his emergency decree and has been a sometimes frustrating partner in Washington’s fight against terrorism, will become a diminished figure, they said, a civilian president in a country where traditionally the power lies with an elected prime minister, or the military chiefs who have overthrown them. Mr. Musharraf came to power in such a coup.
Though General Kayani is considered loyal to the president, the real levers of power will pass to him, and he is believed to favor removing the army from the center of politics, they said. “Kayani is loyal to Musharraf, but also to Pakistan,” one Western military official said.
And as much as Washington has supported Mr. Musharraf, having a chief of the army on the job full time is a change likely to be welcomed. Bush administration officials have already praised General Kayani as someone they can work with.
General Kayani, an infantry commander and a graduate of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, which he attended in 1987 and 1988, has been described by Western diplomats and military officials as well liked and by far Pakistan’s most capable commander.
He has already played a prominent role in cooperating with the United States. He was promoted to full general and made vice chief of Army Staff in October. He immediately visited units serving on the front lines in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and said that sorting out the difficulties plaguing western Pakistan was a priority, a Western military official said.
Even with his new oath of office, Mr. Musharraf will confront considerable political challenges. Before giving up his army post, he transferred the power to lift the de facto martial law to the presidency in a decree last week, and so any decision to lift it remains firmly in his hands.
He continues under intense pressure to rescind the decree he used to suspend the Constitution and appoint a new Supreme Court. The decree has been criticized by opponents and Western diplomats as a blatant move to have his recent election as president confirmed.
Mr. Musharraf is also under pressure to free the senior lawyers and judges who declared his emergency decree illegal and remain under house arrest. Once freed, they are likely to resume their campaign against him.
Not least, with parliamentary elections set for Jan. 8, he will also have to deal with two political opponents who are freshly back from exile, the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the man he overthrew in a coup in 1999.
Both politicians have called for Mr. Musharraf’s resignation and for changes in the Constitution to curb the president’s powers over Parliament. As leaders of Pakistan’s largest political parties, either could head the next government as prime minister, perpetuating their power struggles with Mr. Musharraf as president.
While the military under General Kayani is likely to support Mr. Musharraf as president, it is unlikely to intervene to save him in further political tests of will, said a former general and political analyst, Talat Masood.
One indication of the mood is a letter that 20 former generals, air marshals and admirals, including Mr. Masood, sent this week to President Musharraf calling on him to resign as head of state as well as chief of the army.
They called on him to lift the emergency and restore the Constitution, withdraw curbs on the news media and release political prisoners. Imposing the emergency as chief of army staff was bringing the armed forces into disrepute, they said.
“The actions he is taking are really detrimental to the state,” Mr. Masood said. They had encouraged other countries to interfere in Pakistan’s affairs, specifically Saudi Arabia and the United States, in a way they never had before, and caused Pakistan to lose international respect, he said. He also criticized Mr. Musharraf for suggesting that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would not be safe if he were not in power, which he said was simply untrue.
One of the hardest things for Mr. Musharraf now may be to stop giving the commands.
“He’s the one who wants to sit in the driving seat,” said Pervaiz Elahi, who served as chief minister of the Punjab under General Musharraf. “As commander in chief and president, I still see him as controlling the army for five years,” he said.
He added that he did not think General Kayani would seek to change anything. “Kayani is a person who just goes by the book,” he said.
Though no longer in control of the army, Mr. Musharraf will retain some levers of influence within the military and the intelligence services, like his personal relationship with Gen. Nadeem Taj, the head of the Inter-Intelligence Services, officials said.
Yet other officials said that even with the extra powers given to the president in recent years, such as chairing the National Security Council, real power resides with the army chief. Unlike the American system, a civilian president in Pakistan is titular head of the armed forces.
“By the law of inertia he will continue to have some hold of the army,” said I. A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. But he predicted that during the coming months Mr. Musharraf’s influence would diminish. “He will still have ears in the army, but he will not be able to dictate to them,” Mr. Rehman said.
Much depends on who forms a government after parliamentary elections, because military appointments, among other things, technically reside with the prime minister, said Najam Sethi, editor of The Daily Times.
In a recent interview, Mr. Musharraf indicated that he hoped his supporters in the previous governing coalition would be returned with a majority again, but some of those members complain that his own mistakes during the past nine months have damaged their chances at the polls.
A series of high-handed actions turned Mr. Musharraf from a popular domestic figure and a trophy of sorts for Washington — he signed up to the fight against terrorism immediately after 9/11 — to an embattled leader at home and an increasing embarrassment for the Bush administration.
In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s “The Situation Room,” President Bush said he appreciated that Mr. Musharraf had “kept his word” to step down as military chief.
“I also hope that he enhances Pakistani democracy, and taking off his uniform is a strong first step,” he said. “And having elections that are out from underneath the emergency law would be a clear signal that he has put Pakistan back on the road.”
Mr. Musharraf’s friends and critics alike point to his decision to dismiss the chief justice of the former Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, in early March as his biggest blunder, one that inexorably led to the imposition of emergency rule on Nov. 3.
“He lost his head and tried to fire the chief justice,” said Humayun Gauhar, a friend and the ghostwriter of Mr. Musharraf’s memoir, “In the Line of Fire.”
Mr. Musharraf was prompted by his fear that the increasingly independent court under Justice Chaudhry would eventually rule against him in his effort to be re-elected as president while he remained as army chief, Mr. Gauhar said.
Because of his military mind-set, Mr. Musharraf failed to calculate, Mr. Gauhar said, that the chief justice would mount a popular movement of lawyers against Mr. Musharraf.
“Asking the chief justice to retire was a command,” Mr. Gauhar said. “I don’t think the refusal was ever in his scheme. A civilian would always keep that possibility in mind.”
The firing of the chief justice brought out a latent public dissatisfaction with military rule. Mr. Musharraf’s refusal to give up his military post became the focus of the opposition and obscured many of his earlier achievements, his supporters said.
When he seized power in 1999 and ousted Mr. Sharif, the former prime minister who returned to Pakistan last weekend, Mr. Musharraf was seen as a welcome newcomer who had the ability to clean up the pervasive corruption in Pakistan’s politics. He described himself as a modernizer. He encouraged the opening of independent television stations, and freed up the statist economy.
Born in India in 1943, he came to Pakistan as a refugee at partition in 1947. That status made him an outsider to the feudal society that had produced most of the nation’s rulers.
In the beginning of his rule, he moved swiftly against corruption, said Farook Adam Khan, who served then as prosecutor general for the National Accountability Bureau. But after a year, the general switched gears, Mr. Khan said, stopped pursuing corruption cases and acquiesced to the religious parties in his coalition over various efforts at reforms.
Mr. Musharraf’s supporters say that removing his uniform may come just in time for the president to regain some of his standing.
“As a president without uniform he will help us in the coming elections,” said Mr. Elahi, the former minister who is touted as a likely prime minister if his pro-Musharraf party retains majority.
Carlotta Gall reported from Lahore. Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
Filed under
Ashfaq Kiyani,
Carlotta Gall,
Jane Perlez,
lawyers,
Pakistan,
Pervez Musharraf,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Thursday, November 29, 2007
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
AKI : Pakistan: Militants blame US official's visit for fierce battles
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Pakistan: Militants blame US official's visit for fierce battles
by Syed Saleem Shahzad | November 16, 2007
Karachi -- Fighting in Pakistan's north-western Swat Valley between security forces and supporters of pro-Taliban cleric Mullah Fazlullah, has increased in recent days because of a visit by a senior US official, a Fazlullah spokesman has claimed.
Deputy secretary of state John Negroponte arrived in Pakistan on Friday for talks on the current state of emergency and the future of the country.
"The operation in the Swat Valley was expedited in the last few days because of US official John Negoponte’s visit,” Fazlullah's spokesman, Sirajuddin told Adnkronos International (AKI) on Friday in an exclusive phone interview.
Negroponte was due to hold talks with Musharraf and other officials over the weekend.
“This is the policy of our government that they want to appease foreigners and spill the blood of their people,” Sirajuddin said.
Pakistani security forces have used artillery and helicopter gunships to target the hideouts of pro-Taliban militants in the north-western Swat Valley over the past few days.
Reports on Friday quoting army officials said that at least 40 rebels have been killed, raising the death toll from the past three days of clashes to 100.
However Sirajuddin claimed that over the past 28 days of fighting only 12 fighters loyal to Mullah Fazlullah died while 300 troops from the military and paramilitary forces were killed.
Unrest erupted in Swat in July when fugitive rebel leader Maulana Fazlullah launched a campaign for the imposition of Islamic or Sharia law in the valley. He ran a pirate FM radio station that called for a 'holy war' on government forces and the imposition of tough Islamic laws.
The government moved 2,500 troops into Swat earlier this month and the clashes between security forces and the militants have intensified this week.
There have also been reports that many civilians have been killed in the fighting and that the rebels have captured a string of villages and towns in Swat.
Pakistan's president General Pervez Musharraf, a close US ally in the fight against terrorism, cited rising militant violence as one of the reasons for his decision to impose a nationwide state of emergency on 3 November.
“They [the government] want to extract maximum dollars [from the United States]," said Sirajuddin referring to US aid to Pakistan.
"Sometimes they do that under the pretext of [helping] Afghan refugees, sometimes they extract dollars in order to attack madrassas [Muslim schools] and other times they do it through military operations," he said.
"The government helicopter gunships come and they strike the civilian population," said Fazllulah's spokesman.
"The mujahadeen are in good health at their locations," he said, adding that the militants manage to take cover even when the helicopter gunships strike but "in this process the helicopter fire hits common people."
Sirajuddin said that the army had decided to attack this area because it believed it was controlled by pro-Taliban militants.
"A ceasefire is a possibility but it is up to the government to decide," he said.
"However our government is under intense American pressure and therefore it is compelled to carry out the operation. But if you ask our opinion, a compromise is very easy.
"Our people want the enforcement of Islamic laws. If the government would enforce those laws, a ceasefire will happen immediately," said Sirajuddin.
Sirajuddin maintained that the despite military operations, neither the militants nor civilians have problems getting daily food items in the areas which are under the militants' control.
“However, this is the situation on our side," said Mullah Fazlullah's spokesman. "In areas which are under the government's control, people are facing difficulties in accessing food and other necessities.
"The government has imposed a curfew and its forces harass the people when they try to leave their homes,” he said.
by Syed Saleem Shahzad | November 16, 2007
Karachi -- Fighting in Pakistan's north-western Swat Valley between security forces and supporters of pro-Taliban cleric Mullah Fazlullah, has increased in recent days because of a visit by a senior US official, a Fazlullah spokesman has claimed.
Deputy secretary of state John Negroponte arrived in Pakistan on Friday for talks on the current state of emergency and the future of the country.
"The operation in the Swat Valley was expedited in the last few days because of US official John Negoponte’s visit,” Fazlullah's spokesman, Sirajuddin told Adnkronos International (AKI) on Friday in an exclusive phone interview.
Negroponte was due to hold talks with Musharraf and other officials over the weekend.
“This is the policy of our government that they want to appease foreigners and spill the blood of their people,” Sirajuddin said.
Pakistani security forces have used artillery and helicopter gunships to target the hideouts of pro-Taliban militants in the north-western Swat Valley over the past few days.
Reports on Friday quoting army officials said that at least 40 rebels have been killed, raising the death toll from the past three days of clashes to 100.
However Sirajuddin claimed that over the past 28 days of fighting only 12 fighters loyal to Mullah Fazlullah died while 300 troops from the military and paramilitary forces were killed.
Unrest erupted in Swat in July when fugitive rebel leader Maulana Fazlullah launched a campaign for the imposition of Islamic or Sharia law in the valley. He ran a pirate FM radio station that called for a 'holy war' on government forces and the imposition of tough Islamic laws.
The government moved 2,500 troops into Swat earlier this month and the clashes between security forces and the militants have intensified this week.
There have also been reports that many civilians have been killed in the fighting and that the rebels have captured a string of villages and towns in Swat.
Pakistan's president General Pervez Musharraf, a close US ally in the fight against terrorism, cited rising militant violence as one of the reasons for his decision to impose a nationwide state of emergency on 3 November.
“They [the government] want to extract maximum dollars [from the United States]," said Sirajuddin referring to US aid to Pakistan.
"Sometimes they do that under the pretext of [helping] Afghan refugees, sometimes they extract dollars in order to attack madrassas [Muslim schools] and other times they do it through military operations," he said.
"The government helicopter gunships come and they strike the civilian population," said Fazllulah's spokesman.
"The mujahadeen are in good health at their locations," he said, adding that the militants manage to take cover even when the helicopter gunships strike but "in this process the helicopter fire hits common people."
Sirajuddin said that the army had decided to attack this area because it believed it was controlled by pro-Taliban militants.
"A ceasefire is a possibility but it is up to the government to decide," he said.
"However our government is under intense American pressure and therefore it is compelled to carry out the operation. But if you ask our opinion, a compromise is very easy.
"Our people want the enforcement of Islamic laws. If the government would enforce those laws, a ceasefire will happen immediately," said Sirajuddin.
Sirajuddin maintained that the despite military operations, neither the militants nor civilians have problems getting daily food items in the areas which are under the militants' control.
“However, this is the situation on our side," said Mullah Fazlullah's spokesman. "In areas which are under the government's control, people are facing difficulties in accessing food and other necessities.
"The government has imposed a curfew and its forces harass the people when they try to leave their homes,” he said.
Filed under
John Negroponte,
Karachi,
Maulana Fazlullah,
Pakistan,
Pervez Musharraf,
refugees
by Winter Patriot
on Saturday, November 17, 2007
[
link |
| home
]
| home
]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
