Acts of War
by Scott Ritter
29/07/08 " TruthDig" -- - -The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities which result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned and Americans were being subjected to Iranian-funded covert actions which took the lives of Americans, on American soil, and destroyed American property and livelihood. Many Americans remain unaware of what is transpiring abroad in their name. Many of those who are cognizant of these activities are supportive of them, an outgrowth of misguided sentiment which holds Iran accountable for a list of grievances used by the U.S. government to justify the ongoing global war on terror. Iran, we are told, is not just a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, but is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world today.
Much of the information behind this is being promulgated by Israel, which has a vested interest in seeing Iran neutralized as a potential threat. But Israel is joined by another source, even more puzzling in terms of its broad-based acceptance in the world of American journalism: the Mujahadeen-e Khalk, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group sworn to overthrow the theocracy in Tehran. The CIA today provides material support to the actions of the MEK inside Iran. The recent spate of explosions in Iran, including a particularly devastating “accident” involving a military convoy transporting ammunition in downtown Tehran, appears to be linked to an MEK operation; its agents working inside munitions manufacturing plants deliberately are committing acts of sabotage which lead to such explosions. If CIA money and planning support are behind these actions, the agency’s backing constitutes nothing less than an act of war on the part of the United States against Iran.
The MEK traces its roots back to the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeg. Formed among students and intellectuals, the MEK emerged in the 1960s as a serious threat to the reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi. Facing brutal repression from the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, the MEK became expert at blending into Iranian society, forming a cellular organizational structure which made it virtually impossible to eradicate. The MEK membership also became adept at gaining access to positions of sensitivity and authority. When the Shah was overthrown in 1978, the MEK played a major role and for a while worked hand in glove with the Islamic Revolution in crafting a post-Shah Iran. In 1979 the MEK had a central role in orchestrating the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and holding 55 Americans hostage for 444 days.
However, relations between the MEK and the Islamic regime in Tehran soured, and after the MEK staged a bloody coup attempt in 1981, all ties were severed and the two sides engaged in a violent civil war. Revolutionary Guard members who were active at that time have acknowledged how difficult it was to fight the MEK. In the end, massive acts of arbitrary arrest, torture and executions were required to break the back of mainstream MEK activity in Iran, although even the Revolutionary Guard today admits the MEK remains active and is virtually impossible to completely eradicate.
It is this stubborn ability to survive and operate inside Iran, at a time when no other intelligence service can establish and maintain a meaningful agent network there, which makes the MEK such an asset to nations such as the United States and Israel. The MEK is able to provide some useful intelligence; however, its overall value as an intelligence resource is negatively impacted by the fact that it is the sole source of human intelligence in Iran. As such, the group has taken to exaggerating and fabricating reports to serve its own political agenda. In this way, there is little to differentiate the MEK from another Middle Eastern expatriate opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, which infamously supplied inaccurate intelligence to the United States and other governments and helped influence the U.S. decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Today, the MEK sees itself in a similar role, providing sole-sourced intelligence to the United States and Israel in an effort to facilitate American military operations against Iran and, eventually, to overthrow the Islamic regime in Tehran.
The current situation concerning the MEK would be laughable if it were not for the violent reality of that organization’s activities. Upon its arrival in Iraq in 1986, the group was placed under the control of Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat, or intelligence service. The MEK was a heavily militarized organization and in 1988 participated in division-size military operations against Iran. The organization represents no state and can be found on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, yet since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 the MEK has been under the protection of the U.S. military. Its fighters are even given “protected status” under the Geneva conventions. The MEK says that its members in Iraq are refugees, not terrorists. And yet one would be hard-pressed to find why the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees should confer refugee status on an active paramilitary organization that uses “refugee camps” inside Iraq as its bases.
The MEK is behind much of the intelligence being used by the International Atomic Energy Agency in building its case that Iran may be pursuing (or did in fact pursue in the past) a nuclear weapons program. The complexity of the MEK-CIA relationship was recently underscored by the agency’s acquisition of a laptop computer allegedly containing numerous secret documents pertaining to an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Much has been made about this computer and its contents. The United States has led the charge against Iran within international diplomatic circles, citing the laptop information as the primary source proving Iran’s ongoing involvement in clandestine nuclear weapons activity. Of course, the information on the computer, being derived from questionable sources (i.e., the MEK and the CIA, both sworn enemies of Iran) is controversial and its veracity is questioned by many, including me.
Now, I have a simple solution to the issue of the laptop computer: Give it the UNSCOM treatment. Assemble a team of CIA, FBI and Defense Department forensic computer analysts and probe the computer, byte by byte. Construct a chronological record of how and when the data on the computer were assembled. Check the “logic” of the data, making sure everything fits together in a manner consistent with the computer’s stated function and use. Tell us when the computer was turned on and logged into and how it was used. Then, with this complex usage template constructed, overlay the various themes which have been derived from the computer’s contents, pertaining to projects, studies and other activities of interest. One should be able to rapidly ascertain whether or not the computer is truly a key piece of intelligence pertaining to Iran’s nuclear programs.
The fact that this computer is acknowledged as coming from the MEK and the fact that a proper forensic investigation would probably demonstrate the fabricated nature of the data contained are why the U.S. government will never agree to such an investigation being done. A prosecutor, when making a case of criminal action, must lay out evidence in a simple, direct manner, allowing not only the judge and jury to see it but also the accused. If the evidence is as strong as the prosecutor maintains, it is usually bad news for the defendant. However, if the defendant is able to demonstrate inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the data being presented, then the prosecution is the one in trouble. And if the defense is able to demonstrate that the entire case is built upon fabricated evidence, the case is generally thrown out. This, in short, is what should be done with the IAEA’s ongoing probe into allegations that Iran has pursued nuclear weapons. The evidence used by the IAEA is unable to withstand even the most rudimentary cross-examination. It is speculative at best, and most probably fabricated. Iran has done the right thing in refusing to legitimize this illegitimate source of information.
A key question that must be asked is why, then, does the IAEA continue to permit Olli Heinonen, the agency’s Finnish deputy director for safeguards and the IAEA official responsible for the ongoing technical inspections in Iran, to wage his one-man campaign on behalf of the United States, Britain and (indirectly) Israel regarding allegations derived from sources of such questionable veracity (the MEK-supplied laptop computer)? Moreover, why is such an official given free rein to discuss such sensitive data with the press, or with politically motivated outside agencies, in a manner which results in questionable allegations appearing in the public arena as unquestioned fact? Under normal circumstances, leaks of the sort which have occurred regarding the ongoing investigation into Iran’s alleged past studies on nuclear weapons would be subjected to a thorough investigation to determine the source and to ensure that appropriate measures are taken to end them. And yet, in Vienna, Heinonen’s repeated transgressions are treated as a giant “non-event,” the 800-pound gorilla in the room that everyone pretends isn’t really there.
Heinonen has become the pro-war yin to the anti-confrontation yang of his boss, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei. Every time ElBaradei releases the results of the IAEA probe of Iran, pointing out that the IAEA can find no evidence of any past or present nuclear weapons program, and that there is a full understanding of Iran’s controversial centrifuge-based enrichment program, Heinonen throws a monkey wrench into the works. Well-publicized briefings are given to IAEA-based diplomats. Mysteriously, leaks from undisclosed sources occur. Heinonen’s Finnish nationality serves as a flimsy cover for neutrality which long ago disappeared. He is no longer serving in the role as unbiased inspector, but rather a front for the active pursuit of an American- and Israeli-inspired disinformation campaign designed to keep alive the flimsy allegations of a nonexistent Iranian nuclear weapons program in order to justify the continued warlike stance taken by the U.S. and Israel against Iran.
The fact that the IAEA is being used as a front to pursue this blatantly anti-Iranian propaganda is a disservice to an organization with a mission of vital world importance. The interjection of not only the unverified (and unverifiable) MEK laptop computer data, side by side with a newly placed emphasis on a document relating to the forming of uranium metal into hemispheres of the kind useful in a nuclear weapon, is an amateurish manipulation of data to achieve a preordained outcome. Calling the Iranian possession of the aforementioned document “alarming,” Heinonen (and the media) skipped past the history of the document, which of course has been well explained by Iran previously as something the Pakistani nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan inserted on his own volition to a delivery of documentation pertaining to centrifuges. Far from being a “top-secret” document protected by Iran’s security services, it was discarded in a file of old material that Iran provided to the IAEA inspectors. When the IAEA found the document, Iran allowed it to be fully examined by the inspectors, and answered every question posed by the IAEA about how the document came to be in Iran. For Heinonen to call the document “alarming,” at this late stage in the game, is not only irresponsible but factually inaccurate, given the definition of the word. The Iranian document in question is neither a cause for alarm, seeing as it is not a source for any “sudden fear brought on by the sense of danger,” nor does it provide any “warning of existing or approaching danger,” unless one is speaking of the danger of military action on the part of the United States derived from Heinonen’s unfortunate actions and choice of words.
Olli Heinonen might as well become a salaried member of the Bush administration, since he is operating in lock step with the U.S. government’s objective of painting Iran as a threat worthy of military action. Shortly after Heinonen’s alarmist briefing in March 2008, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, Gregory Schulte, emerged to announce, “As today’s briefing showed us, there are strong reasons to suspect that Iran was working covertly and deceitfully, at least until recently, to build a bomb.” Heinonen’s briefing provided nothing of the sort, being derived from an irrelevant document and a laptop computer of questionable provenance. But that did not matter to Schulte, who noted that “Iran has refused to explain or even acknowledge past work on weaponization.” Schulte did not bother to note that it would be difficult for Iran to explain or acknowledge that which it has not done. “This is particularly troubling,” Schulte went on, “when combined with Iran’s determined effort to master the technology to enrich uranium.” Why is this so troubling? Because, as Schulte noted, “Uranium enrichment is not necessary for Iran’s civil program but it is necessary to produce the fissile material that could be weaponized into a bomb.”
This, of course, is the crux of the issue: Iran’s ongoing enrichment program. Not because it is illegal; Iran is permitted to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under Article IV of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Not again because Iran’s centrifuge program is operating in an undeclared, unmonitored fashion; the IAEA had stated it has a full understanding of the scope and work of the Iranian centrifuge enrichment program and that all associated nuclear material is accounted for and safeguarded. The problem has never been, and will never be, Iran’s enrichment program. The problem is American policy objectives of regime change in Iran, pushed by a combination of American desires for global hegemony and an activist Israeli agenda which seeks regional security, in perpetuity, through military and economic supremacy. The specter of nuclear enrichment is simply a vehicle for facilitating the larger policy objectives. Olli Heinonen, and those who support and sustain his work, must be aware of the larger geopolitical context of his actions, which makes them all the more puzzling and contemptible.
A major culprit in this entire sordid affair is the mainstream media. Displaying an almost uncanny inability to connect the dots, the editors who run America’s largest newspapers, and the producers who put together America’s biggest television news programs, have collectively facilitated the most simplistic, inane and factually unfounded story lines coming out of the Bush White House. The most recent fairy tale was one of “diplomacy,” on the part of one William Burns, the No. 3 diplomat in the State Department.
I have studied the minutes of meetings involving John McCloy, an American official who served numerous administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, in the decades following the end of the Second World War. His diplomacy with the Soviets, conducted with senior Soviet negotiator Valerein Zorin and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself, was real, genuine, direct and designed to resolve differences. The transcripts of the diplomacy conducted between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho to bring an end to the Vietnam conflict is likewise a study in the give and take required to achieve the status of real diplomacy.
Sending a relatively obscure official like Burns to “observe” a meeting between the European Union and Iran, with instructions not to interact, not to initiate, not to discuss, cannot under any circumstances be construed as diplomacy. Any student of diplomatic history could tell you this. And yet the esteemed editors and news producers used the term diplomacy, without challenge or clarification, to describe Burns’ mission to Geneva on July 19. The decision to send him there was hailed as a “significant concession” on the part of the Bush administration, a step away from war and an indication of a new desire within the White House to resolve the Iranian impasse through diplomacy. How this was going to happen with a diplomat hobbled and muzzled to the degree Burns was apparently skipped the attention of these writers and their bosses. Diplomacy, America was told, was the new policy option of choice for the Bush administration.
Of course, the Geneva talks produced nothing. The United States had made sure Europe, through its foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, had no maneuvering room when it came to the core issue of uranium enrichment: Iran must suspend all enrichment before any movement could be made on any other issue. Furthermore, the American-backed program of investigation concerning the MEK-supplied laptop computer further poisoned the diplomatic waters. Iran, predictably, refused to suspend its enrichment program, and rejected the Heinonen-led investigation into nuclear weaponization, refusing to cooperate further with the IAEA on that matter, noting that it fell outside the scope of the IAEA’s mandate in Iran.
Condoleezza Rice was quick to respond. After a debriefing from Burns, who flew to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where Rice was holding closed-door meetings with the foreign ministers of six Arab nations on the issue of Iran, Rice told the media that Iran “was not serious” about resolving the standoff. Having played the diplomacy card, Rice moved on with the real agenda: If Iran did not fully cooperate with the international community (i.e., suspend its enrichment program), then it would face a new round of economic sanctions and undisclosed punitive measures, both unilaterally on the part of the United States and Europe, as well as in the form of even broader sanctions from the United Nations Security Council (although it is doubtful that Russia and China would go along with such a plan).
The issue of unilateral U.S. sanctions is most worrisome. Both the House of Representatives, through HR 362, and the Senate, through SR 580, are preparing legislation which would call for an air, ground and sea blockade of Iran. Back in October 1962, President Kennedy, when considering the imposition of a naval blockade against Cuba in response to the presence of Soviet missiles in that nation, opined that “a blockade is a major military operation, too. It’s an act of war.” Which, of course, it is. The false diplomacy waged by the White House in Geneva simply pre-empted any congressional call for a diplomatic outreach. Now the president can move on with the mission of facilitating a larger war with Iran by legitimizing yet another act of aggression. One day, in the not-so-distant future, Americans will awake to the reality that American military forces are engaged in a shooting war with Iran. Many will scratch their heads and wonder, “How did that happen?” The answer is simple: We all let it happen. We are at war with Iran right now. We just don’t have the moral courage to admit it.
Scott Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector and marine intelligence officer who has written extensively about Iran.
Copyright © 2008 Truthdig, L.L.C.
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Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Death of Free Internet is Imminent
Death of Free Internet is Imminent
Canada Will Become Test Case
By Kevin Parkinson
21/07/08 "Global Research" -- - In the last 15 years or so, as a society we have had access to more information than ever before in modern history because of the Internet. There are approximately 1 billion Internet users in the world B and any one of these users can theoretically communicate in real time with any other on the planet. The Internet has been the greatest technological achievement of the 20th century by far, and has been recognized as such by the global community.
The free transfer of information, uncensored, unlimited and untainted, still seems to be a dream when you think about it. Whatever field that is mentioned- education, commerce, government, news, entertainment, politics and countless other areas- have been radically affected by the introduction of the Internet. And mostly, it's good news, except when poor judgements are made and people are taken advantage of. Scrutiny and oversight are needed, especially where children are involved.
However, when there are potential profits open to a corporation, the needs of society don't count. Take the recent case in Canada with the behemoths, Telus and Rogers rolling out a charge for text messaging without any warning to the public. It was an arrogant and risky move for the telecommunications giants because it backfired. People actually used Internet technology to deliver a loud and clear message to these companies and that was to scrap the extra charge. The people used the power of the Internet against the big boys and the little guys won.
However, the issue of text messaging is just a tiny blip on the radar screens of Telus and another company, Bell Canada, the two largest Internet Service Providers (ISP'S) in Canada. Our country is being used as a test case to drastically change the delivery of Internet service forever. The change will be so radical that it has the potential to send us back to the horse and buggy days of information sharing and access.
In the upcoming weeks watch for a report in Time Magazine that will attempt to smooth over the rough edges of a diabolical plot by Bell Canada and Telus, to begin charging per site fees on most Internet sites. The plan is to convert the Internet into a cable-like system, where customers sign up for specific web sites, and then pay to visit sites beyond a cutoff point.
From my browsing (on the currently free Internet) I have discovered that the 'demise' of the free Internet is slated for 2010 in Canada, and two years later around the world. Canada is seen a good choice to implement such shameful and sinister changes, since Canadians are viewed as being laissez fair, politically uninformed and an easy target. The corporate marauders will iron out the wrinkles in Canada and then spring the new, castrated version of the Internet on the rest of the world, probably with little fanfare, except for some dire warnings about the 'evil' of the Internet (free) and the CEO's spouting about 'safety and security'. These buzzwords usually work pretty well.
What will the Internet look like in Canada in 2010? I suspect that the ISP's will provide a "package" program as companies like Cogeco currently do. Customers will pay for a series of websites as they do now for their television stations. Television stations will be available on-line as part of these packages, which will make the networks happy since they have lost much of the younger market which are surfing and chatting on their computers in the evening. However, as is the case with cable television now, if you choose something that is not part of the package, you know what happens. You pay extra.
And this is where the Internet (free) as we know it will suffer almost immediate, economic strangulation. Thousands and thousands of Internet sites will not be part of the package so users will have to pay extra to visit those sites! In just an hour or two it is possible to easily visit 20-30 sites or more while looking for information. Just imagine how high these costs will be.
At present, the world condemns China because that country restricts certain websites. "They are undemocratic; they are removing people's freedom; they don't respect individual rights; they are censoring information,” are some of the comments we hear. But what Bell Canada and Telus have planned for Canadians is much worse than that. They are planning the death of the Internet (free) as we know it, and I expect they'll be hardly a whimper from Canadians. It's all part of the corporate plan for a New World Order and virtually a masterstroke that will lead to the creation of billions and billions of dollars of corporate profit at the expense of the working and middle classes.
There are so many other implications as a result of these changes, far too many to elaborate on here. Be aware that we will all lose our privacy because all websites will be tracked as part of the billing procedure, and we will be literally cut off from 90% of the information that we can access today. The little guys on the Net will fall likes flies; Bloggers and small website operators will die a quick death because people will not pay to go to their sites and read their pages.
Ironically, the only medium that can save us is the one we are trying to save- the Internet (free). This article will be posted on my Blog, www.realitycheck.typepad.com and I encourage people and groups to learn more about this issue. Canadians can keep the Internet free just as they kept text messaging free. Don't wait for the federal politicians. They will do nothing to help us.
I would welcome a letter to the editor of the Standard Freeholder from a spokesperson from Bell Canada or Telus telling me that I am absolutely wrong in what I have written, and that no such changes to the Internet are being planned, and that access to Internet sites will remain FREE in the years to come. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to write to the media, ask questions, phone the radio station, phone a friend, or think of something else to prevent what appears to me to be inevitable.
Maintaining Internet (free) access is the only way we have a chance at combatting the global corporate takeover, the North American Union, and a long list of other deadly deeds that the elite in society have planned for us. Yesterday was too late in trying to protect our rights and freedoms. We must now redouble our efforts in order to give our children and grandchildren a fighting chance in the future.
Author's website: http://realitycheck.typepad.com/
Canada Will Become Test Case
By Kevin Parkinson
21/07/08 "Global Research" -- - In the last 15 years or so, as a society we have had access to more information than ever before in modern history because of the Internet. There are approximately 1 billion Internet users in the world B and any one of these users can theoretically communicate in real time with any other on the planet. The Internet has been the greatest technological achievement of the 20th century by far, and has been recognized as such by the global community.
The free transfer of information, uncensored, unlimited and untainted, still seems to be a dream when you think about it. Whatever field that is mentioned- education, commerce, government, news, entertainment, politics and countless other areas- have been radically affected by the introduction of the Internet. And mostly, it's good news, except when poor judgements are made and people are taken advantage of. Scrutiny and oversight are needed, especially where children are involved.
However, when there are potential profits open to a corporation, the needs of society don't count. Take the recent case in Canada with the behemoths, Telus and Rogers rolling out a charge for text messaging without any warning to the public. It was an arrogant and risky move for the telecommunications giants because it backfired. People actually used Internet technology to deliver a loud and clear message to these companies and that was to scrap the extra charge. The people used the power of the Internet against the big boys and the little guys won.
However, the issue of text messaging is just a tiny blip on the radar screens of Telus and another company, Bell Canada, the two largest Internet Service Providers (ISP'S) in Canada. Our country is being used as a test case to drastically change the delivery of Internet service forever. The change will be so radical that it has the potential to send us back to the horse and buggy days of information sharing and access.
In the upcoming weeks watch for a report in Time Magazine that will attempt to smooth over the rough edges of a diabolical plot by Bell Canada and Telus, to begin charging per site fees on most Internet sites. The plan is to convert the Internet into a cable-like system, where customers sign up for specific web sites, and then pay to visit sites beyond a cutoff point.
From my browsing (on the currently free Internet) I have discovered that the 'demise' of the free Internet is slated for 2010 in Canada, and two years later around the world. Canada is seen a good choice to implement such shameful and sinister changes, since Canadians are viewed as being laissez fair, politically uninformed and an easy target. The corporate marauders will iron out the wrinkles in Canada and then spring the new, castrated version of the Internet on the rest of the world, probably with little fanfare, except for some dire warnings about the 'evil' of the Internet (free) and the CEO's spouting about 'safety and security'. These buzzwords usually work pretty well.
What will the Internet look like in Canada in 2010? I suspect that the ISP's will provide a "package" program as companies like Cogeco currently do. Customers will pay for a series of websites as they do now for their television stations. Television stations will be available on-line as part of these packages, which will make the networks happy since they have lost much of the younger market which are surfing and chatting on their computers in the evening. However, as is the case with cable television now, if you choose something that is not part of the package, you know what happens. You pay extra.
And this is where the Internet (free) as we know it will suffer almost immediate, economic strangulation. Thousands and thousands of Internet sites will not be part of the package so users will have to pay extra to visit those sites! In just an hour or two it is possible to easily visit 20-30 sites or more while looking for information. Just imagine how high these costs will be.
At present, the world condemns China because that country restricts certain websites. "They are undemocratic; they are removing people's freedom; they don't respect individual rights; they are censoring information,” are some of the comments we hear. But what Bell Canada and Telus have planned for Canadians is much worse than that. They are planning the death of the Internet (free) as we know it, and I expect they'll be hardly a whimper from Canadians. It's all part of the corporate plan for a New World Order and virtually a masterstroke that will lead to the creation of billions and billions of dollars of corporate profit at the expense of the working and middle classes.
There are so many other implications as a result of these changes, far too many to elaborate on here. Be aware that we will all lose our privacy because all websites will be tracked as part of the billing procedure, and we will be literally cut off from 90% of the information that we can access today. The little guys on the Net will fall likes flies; Bloggers and small website operators will die a quick death because people will not pay to go to their sites and read their pages.
Ironically, the only medium that can save us is the one we are trying to save- the Internet (free). This article will be posted on my Blog, www.realitycheck.typepad.com and I encourage people and groups to learn more about this issue. Canadians can keep the Internet free just as they kept text messaging free. Don't wait for the federal politicians. They will do nothing to help us.
I would welcome a letter to the editor of the Standard Freeholder from a spokesperson from Bell Canada or Telus telling me that I am absolutely wrong in what I have written, and that no such changes to the Internet are being planned, and that access to Internet sites will remain FREE in the years to come. In the meantime, I encourage all of you to write to the media, ask questions, phone the radio station, phone a friend, or think of something else to prevent what appears to me to be inevitable.
Maintaining Internet (free) access is the only way we have a chance at combatting the global corporate takeover, the North American Union, and a long list of other deadly deeds that the elite in society have planned for us. Yesterday was too late in trying to protect our rights and freedoms. We must now redouble our efforts in order to give our children and grandchildren a fighting chance in the future.
Author's website: http://realitycheck.typepad.com/
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Oilflation
Gulf Inflation and the Dollar Peg
by Patrick Seale
The oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf are suffering from a painful and insidious disease which, if unchecked, will eat away at their prosperity and stability. The disease is called inflation.
The figures tell the story. Inflation in Saudi Arabia -- by far the region’s biggest economy -- is running at about 10.4% a year; in the United Arab Emirates it is 11%; in Kuwait 10%; in Oman 13.2%; in Qatar 14%.
Double-digit inflation such as this is hard to check. Governments are forced to compensate by increasing subsidies on basic items, by introducing price controls and, above all, by increasing wages of public employees. Private employers have usually to follow suit -- and inflation edges upwards.
In inflationary situations, it is always those who live by their labour -- who have no access to oil revenues and are not cushioned by wealth -- who suffer first and who start to agitate, threatening political stability.
The root cause of Gulf inflation is, of course, the stupendous avalanche of wealth which has poured over the region as a result of the soaring price of oil. Not so long ago, oil was selling at $20; now it is edging towards $150. The oil price has surged seven-fold since 2002. It has doubled in price in the last year alone.
If one cause of inflation is the sharp increase of wealth -- too many riyals and too many dirhams chasing too few goods -- another cause is the peg of most Gulf currencies to the weakening dollar. The Saudi riyal, for example, has been pegged at a rate of 3.75 riyals to the U.S. dollar since 1986.
As the dollar falls sharply against the euro and the yen, such dollar pegs contribute to inflation by making Gulf imports from Europe and Japan more expensive. Oman’s import bill, for example, surged in 2007 by almost 47% to $15.96bn.
Economists and central bankers up and down the Gulf are now debating whether it would be wise to end the dollar peg and revalue their currencies.
A committee of Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council has recommended to King Abdallah that the riyal should be revalued by up to 30%. But Hamad Saud al-Sayyari, head of the Saudi central bank, has said that adjusting exchange rates will not solve the problem of high inflation. Meanwhile, Muhammad al-Jahdhamy, executive vice-president of Oman’s central bank, has said that inflation will stabilise, a remark that implied that a revaluation was not necessary.
Some experts believe that Gulf currencies should abandon the dollar peg in favour of a peg to a basket of currencies. Others argue that only a floating exchange rate would give the Gulf countries the monetary policy independence they need in a situation of global financial turbulence.
Ala’a A-Youssuf, chief economist of the London-based Gulf Finance House, argued in a letter to the Financial Times (July 16) that exchange rate appreciation alone would not be effective. He called for a “comprehensive medium-term development framework that explicitly recognizes the need to contain inflation while fostering growth and development.” Such a programme, he might have added, would be easier to implement if the Gulf countries were to adopt a single currency, on the model of the European Union.
The Financial Times (8 July) has called for Gulf currencies to include the price of oil in the basket to which they could peg their currencies. Their currencies would appreciate when oil was strong and depreciate when it was weak.
The truth is that the world economy is in great trouble. While oil and other commodities continue to climb, stock markets tumble and several leading commercial banks are struggling to stay afloat. In the United States, consumer confidence is at a 28-year low.
The biggest threat overhanging the world economy is the uncertain future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the pillars of the U.S. mortgage market. Together, they own or guarantee almost half of the $12,000bn U.S. mortgage market. But, as house prices fall and foreclosures rise across the United States, they have incurred huge losses. If they collapsed, the consequences could be disastrous for the global financial system -- and for the dollar.
To survive, Fannie and Freddie need to borrow and raise fresh capital. But it will not be easy to attract private lenders so long as it is not clear what the U.S. government will do to save these venerable institutions.
One solution being floated is not to nationalize them -- which would be contrary to America’s liberal market ideology -- but to place them in “conservatorship” -- a sort of disguised nationalization, which would allow the U.S. government to pretend that the liabilities of Fannie and Freddie were not its own.
With the world teetering on the edge of a depression, these are not easy times for financial authorities, whether in the United States, in the Gulf, or indeed anywhere else.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
by Patrick Seale
The oil-rich Arab states of the Gulf are suffering from a painful and insidious disease which, if unchecked, will eat away at their prosperity and stability. The disease is called inflation.
The figures tell the story. Inflation in Saudi Arabia -- by far the region’s biggest economy -- is running at about 10.4% a year; in the United Arab Emirates it is 11%; in Kuwait 10%; in Oman 13.2%; in Qatar 14%.
Double-digit inflation such as this is hard to check. Governments are forced to compensate by increasing subsidies on basic items, by introducing price controls and, above all, by increasing wages of public employees. Private employers have usually to follow suit -- and inflation edges upwards.
In inflationary situations, it is always those who live by their labour -- who have no access to oil revenues and are not cushioned by wealth -- who suffer first and who start to agitate, threatening political stability.
The root cause of Gulf inflation is, of course, the stupendous avalanche of wealth which has poured over the region as a result of the soaring price of oil. Not so long ago, oil was selling at $20; now it is edging towards $150. The oil price has surged seven-fold since 2002. It has doubled in price in the last year alone.
If one cause of inflation is the sharp increase of wealth -- too many riyals and too many dirhams chasing too few goods -- another cause is the peg of most Gulf currencies to the weakening dollar. The Saudi riyal, for example, has been pegged at a rate of 3.75 riyals to the U.S. dollar since 1986.
As the dollar falls sharply against the euro and the yen, such dollar pegs contribute to inflation by making Gulf imports from Europe and Japan more expensive. Oman’s import bill, for example, surged in 2007 by almost 47% to $15.96bn.
Economists and central bankers up and down the Gulf are now debating whether it would be wise to end the dollar peg and revalue their currencies.
A committee of Saudi Arabia’s Shura Council has recommended to King Abdallah that the riyal should be revalued by up to 30%. But Hamad Saud al-Sayyari, head of the Saudi central bank, has said that adjusting exchange rates will not solve the problem of high inflation. Meanwhile, Muhammad al-Jahdhamy, executive vice-president of Oman’s central bank, has said that inflation will stabilise, a remark that implied that a revaluation was not necessary.
Some experts believe that Gulf currencies should abandon the dollar peg in favour of a peg to a basket of currencies. Others argue that only a floating exchange rate would give the Gulf countries the monetary policy independence they need in a situation of global financial turbulence.
Ala’a A-Youssuf, chief economist of the London-based Gulf Finance House, argued in a letter to the Financial Times (July 16) that exchange rate appreciation alone would not be effective. He called for a “comprehensive medium-term development framework that explicitly recognizes the need to contain inflation while fostering growth and development.” Such a programme, he might have added, would be easier to implement if the Gulf countries were to adopt a single currency, on the model of the European Union.
The Financial Times (8 July) has called for Gulf currencies to include the price of oil in the basket to which they could peg their currencies. Their currencies would appreciate when oil was strong and depreciate when it was weak.
The truth is that the world economy is in great trouble. While oil and other commodities continue to climb, stock markets tumble and several leading commercial banks are struggling to stay afloat. In the United States, consumer confidence is at a 28-year low.
The biggest threat overhanging the world economy is the uncertain future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the pillars of the U.S. mortgage market. Together, they own or guarantee almost half of the $12,000bn U.S. mortgage market. But, as house prices fall and foreclosures rise across the United States, they have incurred huge losses. If they collapsed, the consequences could be disastrous for the global financial system -- and for the dollar.
To survive, Fannie and Freddie need to borrow and raise fresh capital. But it will not be easy to attract private lenders so long as it is not clear what the U.S. government will do to save these venerable institutions.
One solution being floated is not to nationalize them -- which would be contrary to America’s liberal market ideology -- but to place them in “conservatorship” -- a sort of disguised nationalization, which would allow the U.S. government to pretend that the liabilities of Fannie and Freddie were not its own.
With the world teetering on the edge of a depression, these are not easy times for financial authorities, whether in the United States, in the Gulf, or indeed anywhere else.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire.
Logging Wrecks Vancouver Island Watersheds
Island's future water supply made unfit by logging
It will take decades to make Leech River Valley suitable resource for Victoria-area communities, official estimates
JUSTINE HUNTER
July 19, 2008
VICTORIA -- The Leech River Valley on Vancouver Island holds the future water supply for the rapidly expanding communities in and around Victoria.
But thanks to logging on private lands, the water is unfit for the city's taps.
The watershed is scarred by clear-cuts. More than 20 landslides, many triggered by logging, mark the steep gulley leading to the Leech River.
Last summer, the Capital Regional District spent nearly $60-million buying the valley from TimberWest Forest Corp. and is now preparing to spend more to restore the watershed to something that mimics the original forest.
It will take decades to restore the watershed to the point that it can provide clean drinking water, estimates Jack Hull, the CRD's general manager for water services.
"We are taking a long-term view," he said yesterday. "We could be looking at 30 or more years."
With growing development pressures on the island, similar conflicts over private timberlands were highlighted this week when Auditor-General John Doyle assailed the former forests minister for a decision on the forestry land base just west of the Leech River watershed.
Mr. Doyle said the province didn't act in the public interest when it removed about 28,000 hectares of Western Forest Products' private timberlands from Forest Ministry regulation, paving the way for real-estate development - or the kind of logging that has marked the Leech River watershed.
Until last year's land-use decision, the Western Forest Products lands were subject to tree farm licence (TFL) regulations that required higher standards for logging. The company has since provisionally sold a portion of the properties around Jordan River to a real-estate developer.
The deal, worth an estimated $150-million to the forest company, has generated anger in communities in the region along the west coast of Vancouver Island. Environmentalists and unionized forest workers have banded together to oppose the sell-off of the timberlands.
Mr. Doyle concluded the government should have looked at what happens to private lands when they are lifted from the TFL restrictions before altering the status of the lands. The province received no compensation for the change.
Historically, forest companies in B.C. agreed to put private forestry lands under provincial control in exchange for access to timber on public land.
"There wasn't a sufficient review of past decisions, they fell between the cracks," Mr. Doyle said in an interview.
But Ben Parfitt, a resource policy analyst for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said the information was there in the government's own database, had the Forests Ministry chosen to consider the potential impact.
In a study released this week, Mr. Parfitt found that logging rates increased dramatically once land was taken out of TFL controls. Companies pay less in taxes and royalties on strictly private lands, and are subject to fewer restrictions to sell raw logs for export.
(Virtually all of the private TFL lands have been wiped out since 1999. There are just a few pockets left on Vancouver Island and in the Kootenays, a total of about 17,000 hectares.) "I think the Leech River watershed is a good example of where the public interest is impacted negatively by logging rates and methods on private lands," Mr. Parfitt said.
His report calls for reforms of private forest land regulations to ensure sustainable harvests. "If we had proper rules in place we wouldn't be out of pocket for the Leech watershed."
Conflicts over logging on private forestry lands are particularly acute on Vancouver Island because a high ratio of the island is in private hands. On the mainland, about 95 per cent of the province is publicly owned. On Vancouver Island, nearly a quarter of the land is in private hands.
With environmental and development pressures rubbing up against logging activities, most of the big private timberland owners are moving into the real estate business.
"Vancouver Island is changing at a rapid rate with respect to population growth," noted Steve Lorimer, TimberWest's manager of public affairs. "There is pressure to find land for areas to live, to recreate and maintain a good water supply." It's a formula that makes it harder to log, but more lucrative to build.
Nearly a fifth of TimberWest's 322,000 hectares of private lands on Vancouver Island have been earmarked for development. As a sign of the times, TimberWest hired its first vice-president of real estate last year.
source
It will take decades to make Leech River Valley suitable resource for Victoria-area communities, official estimates
JUSTINE HUNTER
July 19, 2008
VICTORIA -- The Leech River Valley on Vancouver Island holds the future water supply for the rapidly expanding communities in and around Victoria.
But thanks to logging on private lands, the water is unfit for the city's taps.
The watershed is scarred by clear-cuts. More than 20 landslides, many triggered by logging, mark the steep gulley leading to the Leech River.
Last summer, the Capital Regional District spent nearly $60-million buying the valley from TimberWest Forest Corp. and is now preparing to spend more to restore the watershed to something that mimics the original forest.
It will take decades to restore the watershed to the point that it can provide clean drinking water, estimates Jack Hull, the CRD's general manager for water services.
"We are taking a long-term view," he said yesterday. "We could be looking at 30 or more years."
With growing development pressures on the island, similar conflicts over private timberlands were highlighted this week when Auditor-General John Doyle assailed the former forests minister for a decision on the forestry land base just west of the Leech River watershed.
Mr. Doyle said the province didn't act in the public interest when it removed about 28,000 hectares of Western Forest Products' private timberlands from Forest Ministry regulation, paving the way for real-estate development - or the kind of logging that has marked the Leech River watershed.
Until last year's land-use decision, the Western Forest Products lands were subject to tree farm licence (TFL) regulations that required higher standards for logging. The company has since provisionally sold a portion of the properties around Jordan River to a real-estate developer.
The deal, worth an estimated $150-million to the forest company, has generated anger in communities in the region along the west coast of Vancouver Island. Environmentalists and unionized forest workers have banded together to oppose the sell-off of the timberlands.
Mr. Doyle concluded the government should have looked at what happens to private lands when they are lifted from the TFL restrictions before altering the status of the lands. The province received no compensation for the change.
Historically, forest companies in B.C. agreed to put private forestry lands under provincial control in exchange for access to timber on public land.
"There wasn't a sufficient review of past decisions, they fell between the cracks," Mr. Doyle said in an interview.
But Ben Parfitt, a resource policy analyst for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, said the information was there in the government's own database, had the Forests Ministry chosen to consider the potential impact.
In a study released this week, Mr. Parfitt found that logging rates increased dramatically once land was taken out of TFL controls. Companies pay less in taxes and royalties on strictly private lands, and are subject to fewer restrictions to sell raw logs for export.
(Virtually all of the private TFL lands have been wiped out since 1999. There are just a few pockets left on Vancouver Island and in the Kootenays, a total of about 17,000 hectares.) "I think the Leech River watershed is a good example of where the public interest is impacted negatively by logging rates and methods on private lands," Mr. Parfitt said.
His report calls for reforms of private forest land regulations to ensure sustainable harvests. "If we had proper rules in place we wouldn't be out of pocket for the Leech watershed."
Conflicts over logging on private forestry lands are particularly acute on Vancouver Island because a high ratio of the island is in private hands. On the mainland, about 95 per cent of the province is publicly owned. On Vancouver Island, nearly a quarter of the land is in private hands.
With environmental and development pressures rubbing up against logging activities, most of the big private timberland owners are moving into the real estate business.
"Vancouver Island is changing at a rapid rate with respect to population growth," noted Steve Lorimer, TimberWest's manager of public affairs. "There is pressure to find land for areas to live, to recreate and maintain a good water supply." It's a formula that makes it harder to log, but more lucrative to build.
Nearly a fifth of TimberWest's 322,000 hectares of private lands on Vancouver Island have been earmarked for development. As a sign of the times, TimberWest hired its first vice-president of real estate last year.
source
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Of Dogs and War Crimes: The Paul Henss Case
War Crimes Paradox
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
National Public Radio has been spending much news time on Darfur in Western Sudan where a great deal of human suffering and death are occurring. The military conflict has been brought on in part by climate change, according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Drought is forcing nomads in search of water into areas occupied by other claimants. No doubt the conflict is tribal and racial as well. The entire catastrophe is overseen by a government with few resources other than bullets.
Now an International Criminal Court prosecutor wants to bring charges against Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
I have no sympathy for people who make others suffer. Nevertheless, I wonder at the International Criminal Court’s pick from the assortment of war criminals? Why al-Bashir?
Is it because Sudan is a powerless state, and the International Criminal Court hasn’t the courage to name George W. Bush and Tony Blair as war criminals?
Bush and Blair’s crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan dwarf, at least in the number of deaths and displaced persons, the terrible situation in Darfur. The highest estimate of Darfur casualties is 400,000, one-third the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of Bush’s invasion. Moreover, the conflict in the Sudan is an internal one, whereas Bush illegally invaded two foreign countries, war crimes under the Nuremberg Standard. Bush’s war crimes were enabled by the political leaders of the UK, Spain, Canada, and Australia. The leaders of every member of the “coalition of the willing to commit war crimes” are candidates for the dock.
But of course the Great Moral West does not commit war crimes. War crimes are charges fobbed off on people demonized by the Western media, such as the Serbian Milosovic and the Sudanese al-Bashir.
Every week the Israeli government evicts Palestinians from their homes, steals their land, and kills Palestinian women and children. These crimes against humanity have been going on for decades. Except for a few Israeli human rights organizations, no one complains about it. Palestinians are defined as “terrorists,” and “terrorists” can be treated inhumanely without complaint.
Iraqis and Afghans suffer the same fate. Iraqis who resist US occupation of their country are “terrorists.” Taliban is a demonized name. Every Afghan killed--even those attending wedding parties--is claimed to be Taliban by the US military. Iraqis and Afghans can be murdered at will by American and NATO troops without anyone raising human rights issues.
The International Criminal Court is a bureaucracy. It has a budget, and it needs to do something to justify its budget. Lacking teeth and courage, it goes after the petty war criminals and leaves the big ones alone.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m for holding all governments accountable for their criminal actions. It is the hypocrisy to which I object. The West gives itself and Israel a pass while damning everyone else. Even human rights groups fall into the trap. Rights activists don’t see the buffoonery in their complaint that President Bush, who has violated more human rights than any person alive, is letting China off the hook for human rights abuses by attending the Olympics hosted by China.
President Bush claims that the enormous destruction and death he has brought to Iraq and Afghanistan are necessary in order for Americans to be safe. If we are accepting excuses this feeble, Milosovic passed muster with his excuse that as the head of state he was obliged to try to preserve the state’s territorial integrity. Is al-Bashir supposed to accept secession in the Sudan, something that Lincoln would not accept from the Confederacy? How long would al-Bashir last if he partitioned Sudan?
Last October the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a photo on its front page above the fold of an elderly man with mikes shoved in his face. Paul Henss, 85 years old, is being deported from the US, where he has lived for 53 years, because Eli Rosenbaum, director the the US State Department’s Nazi-hunting bureaucracy, declared him a war criminal for training guard dogs used at German concentration camps. Henss was 22 years old when World War II ended.
A kid who trained guard dogs is being deported as a war criminal, but the head of state who launched two wars of naked aggression, resulting in the deaths of more than 1.2 million people, and who has the entire world on edge awaiting his third war of aggression, this time against Iran, is received respectfully by foreign governments. Corporations and trade associations will pay him $100,000 per speech when he leaves office. He will make millions of dollars more from memoirs written by a ghostwriter.
Does no one see the paradox of deporting Henss while leaving the war criminal in the White House?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
source
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Portrait of Panic
Portrait of a Panic
by Nicholas von Hoffman
For the past two days, America has been shaken by photos and video reports of angry customers lined up to withdraw their money from branch offices of the failed IndyMac bank. Such images would not have been seen during America's last great financial disaster.
Comb the microfilm records of newspapers in 1931 and 1932, when depositor panics closed most of the banks in the United States, and you will not find a picture of terrified depositors lining up in hopes of extricating their life savings. Their absence stemmed from editors' fear that the publicity would intensify the panic.
Today editors exercise no such restraint -- and with the Internet, who needs editors? Stockholders in banks and kindred financial institutions are in such a panic state, they cannot get rid of their investments fast enough. But as they dump their holdings, the price tanks faster than they sell.
Media images of panicked Americans may have depressed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. But more depressing after his repeated efforts -- including the throat-slitting of Bear Stearns -- must be in realizing that he has failed.
In the space of a year, Citigroup, once considered America's largest bank and now the world's largest mess, has seen the price of a share of its stock fall from almost $53 to less than $14. Most of that happened before Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson popped up in front of a replica of the Liberty Bell on a Sunday afternoon to announce his plan to save, bolster, prop up, rescue, bail out or pick-your-verb Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
In the years before Paulson's plan, Bernanke had moved hell and high water to stop the implacable slide of real estate prices, but he has not been able to do it. He loaned money, he pumped money, he swapped money for unsellable bonds. In every imaginable way he forced money into the imploding system, and to no avail; the price of real estate keeps dropping.
Bonds, derivatives and all the other financial arcana have lost value to the point that nobody knows what anything is worth anymore. The superstructure of what is now only ironically called high finance is melting and swaying.
The announcement of the Paulson plan, meant to soothe and reassure, has had no such effect. If anything, in the days after his announcement the contagion has spread. Instead of the stock market perking up and the mortgage world calming down, there were predictions that we will shortly see as many as 150 banks fail.
"There is widespread speculation and rumors in the markets today," said a beleaguered spokesperson for Cleveland's National City Bank, adding plaintively, "Look, we are not experiencing any unusual depositor or creditor activity today." The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has distinguished itself through the months of this developing disaster by doing nothing, told the world it would be going after anyone spreading "false" rumors driving down the price of securities. True rumors are apparently OK.
While the Securities and Exchange Commission was swatting flies, Chairman Bernanke turned up on Capitol Hill to tell Congress that he was one confused man. That was the gist of a presentation in which he was able to do little more than point out the dangers of a collapsing economy and growing inflation.
As he was speaking, General Motors was telling its employees and its stockholders that more layoffs, huge salary cuts, and no more dividends were in their immediate future. At the same time the dollar drank the shrinking potion from Alice in Wonderland and set a new record for weakness against the euro.
The American economy has not been in such serious trouble in seventy-five years. You cannot expect government officials to say that, however. Commerce, like religion, depends on faith. That Paulson would present a plan that contradicts everything he has stood for as a businessman and a Republican demonstrates what he actually thinks.
Things are going to get worse, and people know it. Panic, fear and worry about jobs, savings, debts and bills are on the minds of millions. Unemployment will grow, incomes will continue to shrink and prices grow higher as more companies head for bankruptcy court.
The Paulson plan, like the Bernanke plans that preceded it, is not tough enough, not close enough to the bone to make a telling difference. His is a temporizing attempt to prop up the unproppable. There is too much rot in these financial institutions. They will have to be allowed to fail and be reorganized in the process of which a lot of people will, in Wall Street parlance, take a major haircut.
Nicholas von Hoffman writes regularly for The Nation. He is the author of thirteen books, including Citizen Cohn, and he is a columnist for the New York Observer.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
Monday, July 14, 2008
The Tortured Rule of Law
Torture and the rule of law
by Glenn Greenwald
The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, one of the country's handful of truly excellent investigative journalists over the last seven years, has written a new book -- "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals" -- which reveals several extraordinary (though unsurprising) facts regarding America's torture regime. According to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which received an advanced copy, Mayer's book reports the following:
"Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
"A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
"[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases . . .
'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.'"
"[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".
"[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"
This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want -- including breaking our laws -- and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country -- live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We've collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws -- that when they break the law, there will be no consequences. We've thus become a country which lives under the proverbial "rule of men" -- that is literally true, with no hyperbole needed -- and Mayer's revelations are nothing more than the inevitable by-product of that choice.
That's why this ongoing, well-intentioned debate that Andrew Sullivan is having with himself and his readers over whether "torture is worse than illegal, warrantless eavesdropping" is so misplaced, and it's also why those who are dismissing as "an overblown distraction" the anger generated by last week's Congressional protection of surveillance lawbreakers are so deeply misguided. Things like "torture" and "illegal eavesdropping" can't be compared as though they're separate, competing policies. They are rooted in the same framework of lawlessness. The same rationale that justifies one is what justifies the other. Endorsing one is to endorse all of it.
In fact, none of the scandals of radicalism and criminality which we've learned about over the last seven years -- including the creation of this illegal torture regime -- can be viewed in isolation. They're all by-products of the country that we've become in the post-9/11 era, primarily as a result of our collective decision to exempt our Government leaders from the rule of law; to acquiesce to the manipulative claim that we can only be Safe if we allow our Leaders to be free from consequences when they commit crimes; and to demonize advocates of the rule of law as -- to use Larry Lessig's mindless, reactionary clichés -- shrill, Leftist "hysterics" who need to "get off [their] high horse(s)".
That is the mentality that has allowed the Bush administration to engage in this profound assault on our national character, to violate our laws at will. Our political and media elite have acquiesced to all of this when they weren't cheering it all on. Those who object to it, who argue that these abuses of political power are dangerous in the extreme and that we cannot tolerate deliberate government lawbreaking, are dismissed as shrill Leftist hysterics.
All the way back in May, 2006 -- just months after the NYT revealed the illegal NSA spying program -- I wrote in my first book, How Would a Patriot Act, the following about the NSA eavesdropping scandal:
This is not about eavesdropping. This is about whether we are a nation of laws . . . . The heart of the matter is that the President broke the law, repeatedly and deliberately, no matter what his rationale for doing so was . . . .
The National Security Agency eavesdropping scandal is not an isolated act of lawbreaking. It is an outgrowth of an ideology of lawlessness that has been adopted by the Bush administration as its governing doctrine. Others include the incarceration in military prisons of U.S. citizens who were not charged with any crime or even allowed access to a lawyer, the use of legally prohibited torture techniques, and the establishment of a military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, a no-man's-land that the administration claims is beyond the reach of U.S. law. In the media and the public mind, these issues have been seen in isolation, as though they are unconnected.
In fact, all of these controversial actions can be traced to a single cause, a shared root. They are grounded in, and are the by-product of, an unprecedented and truly radical theory of presidential power that, at its core, maintains that the president's power is literally unlimited and absolute in matters relating to terrorism or national security. . . .
What we have in our federal government are not individual acts of lawbreaking or isolated scandals of illegality, but instead a culture and an ideology of lawlessness.
But those who argued such things were The Shrill Leftists, The Crazed Civil-Liberties Extremists, the Hysterics. And they still are. By contrast, Serious People understood -- and still understand -- that our leaders made complex and weighty decisions for our own Good and that terms like "lawbreaking" and "war crimes" and "prosecutions" have no place in respectable American political circles. Hence, our political leaders operate in a climate where they know they can do anything -- anything at all, including flagrantly breaking our most serious laws -- and they will be defended, or at least have their behavior mitigated, by a virtually unanimous political and media establishment. The hand-wringing over Mayer's latest revelations will be led by the very people who are responsible for what has taken place -- responsible because they decided that rampant, deliberate lawbreaking by our Government officials was nothing to get worked up over.
There are many political disputes -- probably most -- composed of two or more reasonable sides. Whether the U.S. Government has committed war crimes by torturing detainees -- conduct that is illegal under domestic law and international treaties which are binding law in this country -- isn't an example of a reasonable, two-sided political dispute. Nor is the issue of whether the U.S. Government and the telecom industry engaged in illegal acts for years by spying on Americans without warrants. Nor is the question of whether we should allow Government officials to break our laws at will by claiming that doing so is necessary to keep us Safe.
There just aren't two sides to those matters. That's what the International Red Cross means when it says that what we did to Guantanamo detainees was "categorically torture." It's what the only federal judges to adjudicate the question -- all three -- have concluded when they found that the President clearly broke our laws with no valid excuses by spying on our communications for years with no warrants. It's why the Bush administration has sought -- and repeatedly received -- immunity and amnesty for the people who have implemented these policies. It's because these actions are clearly illegal -- criminal -- and we all know that.
And that's true no matter how many Bush-loyal DOJ lawyers justify the behavior, no matter how many right-wing lawyers go on TV to defend the Government's conduct, no matter how many Brookings "scholars" go to The New Republic in order flamboyantly to boast how deeply complex these matters are and how only Super-Experts (like themselves) can grapple with the fascinating intellectual puzzles they pose. Displaying cognitive angst and/or above-it-all indifference in the face of unambiguously illegal and morally reprehensible government conduct isn't a sign of intellectual sophistication or political Seriousness. It's exactly the opposite. It's the hallmark of complicity with it.
Law Professor Jonathan Turley, on MSNBC last night discussing Mayer's revelations, put it this way:
[The IRC] is the world's preeminent institution on the conditions and treatment of prisoners and specifically what constitutes torture. And the important thing here is they're saying it's not a close question, that as many of us, and there are many, many of us who have argued for years that this is clearly, unmistakably a torture program; the Red Cross is saying the same.
The problem for the Bush administration is they perfected plausible deniability techniques. They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether water-boarding is torture. And it leaves the impression that it's a close question. It's not. It's just like the domestic surveillance program that the a federal court just a week ago also said was not a close question. These are illegal acts. These are crimes. And there weren't questions before and there's not questions now as to the illegality. . . .
I never thought I would say this, but I think it might, in fact, be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would say that, that we have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law. I never imagined that a Congress, a Democratic-led Congress would refuse to take actions, even with the preeminent institution of the Red Cross saying, this is clearly torture and torture is a war crime. They are still refusing to take meaningful action.
So, we've come to this ignoble moment where we could be forced into a tribunal and forced to face the rule of law that we've refused to apply to ourselves.
That's the inevitable outcome when a country's political establishment decrees itself exempt from the rule of law. If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes. Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.
When our political and media elite aren't defending the Bush administration's lawbreaking, they're dismissing its importance. David Broder believes that government crimes are mere "policy disputes" that shouldn't be punished. And here's "liberal" pundit Tim Rutten of The Los Angeles Times, acknowledging that our highest political officials ordered illegal torture, but then invoking the very common -- and indescribably destructive -- mentality of most of our Good Establishment Liberals to insist that they should not be held legally accountable:
It's true that there are a handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics who would dearly like to see such trials, but actually pursuing them would be a profound -- even tragic -- mistake. Our political system works as smoothly as it does, in part, because we've never criminalized differences over policy. Since Andrew Jackson's time, our electoral victors celebrate by throwing the losers out of work -- not into jail cells.
The Bush administration has been wretchedly mistaken in its conception of executive power, deceitful in its push for war with Iraq and appalling in its scheming to make torture an instrument of state power. But a healthy democracy punishes policy mistakes, however egregious, and seeks redress for its societal wounds, however deep, at the ballot box and not in the prisoner's dock.
To do otherwise risks the stability of our own electoral politics almost as recklessly as the Bush/Cheney regime has risked our national interests abroad.
That warped mentality -- as much as the most lawless elements of the Bush administration -- is what is responsible for the destruction of our fundamental national character over the last seven years. "Laws" and "crimes" are only for the common people and for other countries. We're too magisterial a country, our political leaders are too Important and too Good, to subject them to punishment when they break our laws. That's the mentality that has created the climate of Lawlessness that defines who we are.
Yes, I'm well aware that the U.S, like all countries, was deeply imperfect prior to 9/11, and that many of the systematic excesses of the Bush era have their genesis prior to 2001. The difference (a critical one) is that what had been acts of lawbreaking and violations of our national values have become the norm -- consistent with, rather than violative of, our express values and policies. As Mayer writes in her book:
For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the official law of the land in all but name.
The enactment of the new FISA bill last week was destructive for many reasons, including the fact that it legalized a regime of warrantless eavesdropping that is certain to be abused. But the far more destructive aspect of the new law is that it was just the latest example -- albeit the most flagrant -- of our political class abolishing the rule of law in this country.
It will never stop being jarring that Pulitzer-Prize-winning revelations from the New York Times that the President and the telecom industry were committing felonies for years culminated in the full-scale protection of the lawbreakers and retroactive legalization of the criminality by the "opposition party" which controls the Congress.
One cannot coherently sanction or even acquiesce to serious government lawbreaking and then feign outrage over illegal torture and other war crimes. The sanctioning of government illegality is precisely what leads to abuses like the American torture regime. Those who have spent the last seven years scoffing at Unserious, Hysterical objections to Bush lawlessness are the very people who have created this climate that they will now pretend to find so upsetting. The "rule of law" isn't some left-wing dogma that is the province of Leftist radicals and hysterics. It's the cornerstone of every civilized and free society, and Jane Mayer's new book is but the latest piece of evidence to prove that.
-- Glenn Greenwald
Permalink
by Glenn Greenwald
The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, one of the country's handful of truly excellent investigative journalists over the last seven years, has written a new book -- "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals" -- which reveals several extraordinary (though unsurprising) facts regarding America's torture regime. According to the New York Times and Washington Post, both of which received an advanced copy, Mayer's book reports the following:
"Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes."
"A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite incarceration."
"[A] top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees' cases . . .
'There will be no review,' the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. 'The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.'"
"[T]he [CIA] analyst estimated that a full third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake. When told of those findings, the top military commander at Guantanamo at the time, Major Gen. Michael Dunlavey, not only agreed with the assessment but suggested that an even higher percentage of detentions -- up to half -- were in error. Later, an academic study by Seton Hall University Law School concluded that 55 percent of detainees had never engaged in hostile acts against the United States, and only 8 percent had any association with al-Qaeda."
[T]he International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law".
"[T]he Red Cross document 'warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.'"
This is what a country becomes when it decides that it will not live under the rule of law, when it communicates to its political leaders that they are free to do whatever they want -- including breaking our laws -- and there will be no consequences. There are two choices and only two choices for every country -- live under the rule of law or live under the rule of men. We've collectively decided that our most powerful political leaders are not bound by our laws -- that when they break the law, there will be no consequences. We've thus become a country which lives under the proverbial "rule of men" -- that is literally true, with no hyperbole needed -- and Mayer's revelations are nothing more than the inevitable by-product of that choice.
That's why this ongoing, well-intentioned debate that Andrew Sullivan is having with himself and his readers over whether "torture is worse than illegal, warrantless eavesdropping" is so misplaced, and it's also why those who are dismissing as "an overblown distraction" the anger generated by last week's Congressional protection of surveillance lawbreakers are so deeply misguided. Things like "torture" and "illegal eavesdropping" can't be compared as though they're separate, competing policies. They are rooted in the same framework of lawlessness. The same rationale that justifies one is what justifies the other. Endorsing one is to endorse all of it.
In fact, none of the scandals of radicalism and criminality which we've learned about over the last seven years -- including the creation of this illegal torture regime -- can be viewed in isolation. They're all by-products of the country that we've become in the post-9/11 era, primarily as a result of our collective decision to exempt our Government leaders from the rule of law; to acquiesce to the manipulative claim that we can only be Safe if we allow our Leaders to be free from consequences when they commit crimes; and to demonize advocates of the rule of law as -- to use Larry Lessig's mindless, reactionary clichés -- shrill, Leftist "hysterics" who need to "get off [their] high horse(s)".
That is the mentality that has allowed the Bush administration to engage in this profound assault on our national character, to violate our laws at will. Our political and media elite have acquiesced to all of this when they weren't cheering it all on. Those who object to it, who argue that these abuses of political power are dangerous in the extreme and that we cannot tolerate deliberate government lawbreaking, are dismissed as shrill Leftist hysterics.
All the way back in May, 2006 -- just months after the NYT revealed the illegal NSA spying program -- I wrote in my first book, How Would a Patriot Act, the following about the NSA eavesdropping scandal:
This is not about eavesdropping. This is about whether we are a nation of laws . . . . The heart of the matter is that the President broke the law, repeatedly and deliberately, no matter what his rationale for doing so was . . . .
The National Security Agency eavesdropping scandal is not an isolated act of lawbreaking. It is an outgrowth of an ideology of lawlessness that has been adopted by the Bush administration as its governing doctrine. Others include the incarceration in military prisons of U.S. citizens who were not charged with any crime or even allowed access to a lawyer, the use of legally prohibited torture techniques, and the establishment of a military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, a no-man's-land that the administration claims is beyond the reach of U.S. law. In the media and the public mind, these issues have been seen in isolation, as though they are unconnected.
In fact, all of these controversial actions can be traced to a single cause, a shared root. They are grounded in, and are the by-product of, an unprecedented and truly radical theory of presidential power that, at its core, maintains that the president's power is literally unlimited and absolute in matters relating to terrorism or national security. . . .
What we have in our federal government are not individual acts of lawbreaking or isolated scandals of illegality, but instead a culture and an ideology of lawlessness.
But those who argued such things were The Shrill Leftists, The Crazed Civil-Liberties Extremists, the Hysterics. And they still are. By contrast, Serious People understood -- and still understand -- that our leaders made complex and weighty decisions for our own Good and that terms like "lawbreaking" and "war crimes" and "prosecutions" have no place in respectable American political circles. Hence, our political leaders operate in a climate where they know they can do anything -- anything at all, including flagrantly breaking our most serious laws -- and they will be defended, or at least have their behavior mitigated, by a virtually unanimous political and media establishment. The hand-wringing over Mayer's latest revelations will be led by the very people who are responsible for what has taken place -- responsible because they decided that rampant, deliberate lawbreaking by our Government officials was nothing to get worked up over.
There are many political disputes -- probably most -- composed of two or more reasonable sides. Whether the U.S. Government has committed war crimes by torturing detainees -- conduct that is illegal under domestic law and international treaties which are binding law in this country -- isn't an example of a reasonable, two-sided political dispute. Nor is the issue of whether the U.S. Government and the telecom industry engaged in illegal acts for years by spying on Americans without warrants. Nor is the question of whether we should allow Government officials to break our laws at will by claiming that doing so is necessary to keep us Safe.
There just aren't two sides to those matters. That's what the International Red Cross means when it says that what we did to Guantanamo detainees was "categorically torture." It's what the only federal judges to adjudicate the question -- all three -- have concluded when they found that the President clearly broke our laws with no valid excuses by spying on our communications for years with no warrants. It's why the Bush administration has sought -- and repeatedly received -- immunity and amnesty for the people who have implemented these policies. It's because these actions are clearly illegal -- criminal -- and we all know that.
And that's true no matter how many Bush-loyal DOJ lawyers justify the behavior, no matter how many right-wing lawyers go on TV to defend the Government's conduct, no matter how many Brookings "scholars" go to The New Republic in order flamboyantly to boast how deeply complex these matters are and how only Super-Experts (like themselves) can grapple with the fascinating intellectual puzzles they pose. Displaying cognitive angst and/or above-it-all indifference in the face of unambiguously illegal and morally reprehensible government conduct isn't a sign of intellectual sophistication or political Seriousness. It's exactly the opposite. It's the hallmark of complicity with it.
Law Professor Jonathan Turley, on MSNBC last night discussing Mayer's revelations, put it this way:
[The IRC] is the world's preeminent institution on the conditions and treatment of prisoners and specifically what constitutes torture. And the important thing here is they're saying it's not a close question, that as many of us, and there are many, many of us who have argued for years that this is clearly, unmistakably a torture program; the Red Cross is saying the same.
The problem for the Bush administration is they perfected plausible deniability techniques. They bring out one or two people that are willing to debate on cable shows whether water-boarding is torture. And it leaves the impression that it's a close question. It's not. It's just like the domestic surveillance program that the a federal court just a week ago also said was not a close question. These are illegal acts. These are crimes. And there weren't questions before and there's not questions now as to the illegality. . . .
I never thought I would say this, but I think it might, in fact, be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would say that, that we have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law. I never imagined that a Congress, a Democratic-led Congress would refuse to take actions, even with the preeminent institution of the Red Cross saying, this is clearly torture and torture is a war crime. They are still refusing to take meaningful action.
So, we've come to this ignoble moment where we could be forced into a tribunal and forced to face the rule of law that we've refused to apply to ourselves.
That's the inevitable outcome when a country's political establishment decrees itself exempt from the rule of law. If the rule of law doesn't constrain the actions of government officials, then nothing will. Continuous revelations of serious government lawbreaking have led not to investigations or punishment but to retroactive immunity and concealment of the crimes. Judicial findings of illegal government behavior have led to Congressional action to protect the lawbreakers. The Detainee Treatment Act. The Military Commissions Act. The Protect America Act. The FISA Amendments Act. They're all rooted in the same premise: that our highest government leaders have the power to ignore our laws with impunity, and when they're caught, they should be immunized and protected, not punished.
When our political and media elite aren't defending the Bush administration's lawbreaking, they're dismissing its importance. David Broder believes that government crimes are mere "policy disputes" that shouldn't be punished. And here's "liberal" pundit Tim Rutten of The Los Angeles Times, acknowledging that our highest political officials ordered illegal torture, but then invoking the very common -- and indescribably destructive -- mentality of most of our Good Establishment Liberals to insist that they should not be held legally accountable:
It's true that there are a handful of European rights activists and people on the lacy left fringe of American politics who would dearly like to see such trials, but actually pursuing them would be a profound -- even tragic -- mistake. Our political system works as smoothly as it does, in part, because we've never criminalized differences over policy. Since Andrew Jackson's time, our electoral victors celebrate by throwing the losers out of work -- not into jail cells.
The Bush administration has been wretchedly mistaken in its conception of executive power, deceitful in its push for war with Iraq and appalling in its scheming to make torture an instrument of state power. But a healthy democracy punishes policy mistakes, however egregious, and seeks redress for its societal wounds, however deep, at the ballot box and not in the prisoner's dock.
To do otherwise risks the stability of our own electoral politics almost as recklessly as the Bush/Cheney regime has risked our national interests abroad.
That warped mentality -- as much as the most lawless elements of the Bush administration -- is what is responsible for the destruction of our fundamental national character over the last seven years. "Laws" and "crimes" are only for the common people and for other countries. We're too magisterial a country, our political leaders are too Important and too Good, to subject them to punishment when they break our laws. That's the mentality that has created the climate of Lawlessness that defines who we are.
Yes, I'm well aware that the U.S, like all countries, was deeply imperfect prior to 9/11, and that many of the systematic excesses of the Bush era have their genesis prior to 2001. The difference (a critical one) is that what had been acts of lawbreaking and violations of our national values have become the norm -- consistent with, rather than violative of, our express values and policies. As Mayer writes in her book:
For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives, making torture the official law of the land in all but name.
The enactment of the new FISA bill last week was destructive for many reasons, including the fact that it legalized a regime of warrantless eavesdropping that is certain to be abused. But the far more destructive aspect of the new law is that it was just the latest example -- albeit the most flagrant -- of our political class abolishing the rule of law in this country.
It will never stop being jarring that Pulitzer-Prize-winning revelations from the New York Times that the President and the telecom industry were committing felonies for years culminated in the full-scale protection of the lawbreakers and retroactive legalization of the criminality by the "opposition party" which controls the Congress.
One cannot coherently sanction or even acquiesce to serious government lawbreaking and then feign outrage over illegal torture and other war crimes. The sanctioning of government illegality is precisely what leads to abuses like the American torture regime. Those who have spent the last seven years scoffing at Unserious, Hysterical objections to Bush lawlessness are the very people who have created this climate that they will now pretend to find so upsetting. The "rule of law" isn't some left-wing dogma that is the province of Leftist radicals and hysterics. It's the cornerstone of every civilized and free society, and Jane Mayer's new book is but the latest piece of evidence to prove that.
-- Glenn Greenwald
Permalink
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and About that Hard Drive
Raúl Reyes’ Hard Drives
by Maurice Lemoine
The first of 10 smart bombs guided by GPS hit its target at 00.25 on 1 March 2008, less than two kilometres from the Ecuador-Colombia border, along the Putomayo river. Four Blackhawk OH-60 helicopters appeared out of the darkness with 44 special commandos from Colombia’s rapid deployment force on board. But there was no fighting: The temporary camp of the FARC (the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) had been destroyed by the explosions and 23 people killed in their sleep. Among them was Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second-in-command and the group’s “foreign minister.” His remains were taken back to Colombia by ground troops as a trophy.
Early that morning Colombian president Alvaro Uribe contacted his Ecuadorian counterpart, Rafael Correa, to brief him on the raid: The Colombian airborne unit had been attacked from within Ecuador and had pursued the rebels in legitimate self-defence. But, he assured Correa, their return of fire came from Colombian territory and didn’t violate Ecuador’s airspace. Colombia’s defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, gave the same assurance later.
Initially Correa took Uribe at his word. Until this incident they had been on good terms and spoke on the phone every day. Two weeks before, Correa had said in private to one of the close advisers of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez: “Tell Chávez that I get on very well with Uribe and that if he wants I can help smooth things out between them.” Correa felt betrayed, a feeling compounded when Ecuadorian military personnel arrived at the bombed camp: not only had the Colombians violated Ecuadorian territory, they had also, as Correa put it in a press conference on 2 March, conducted “a massacre”.
Reyes’ death sparked a crisis. Ecuador severed diplomatic relations with Colombia and deployed 11,000 men along its border. Venezuela also sent 10 battalions to its border. “We don’t want war,” Chávez warned, “but we won’t allow the [North American] empire, nor its little dog [Colombia], to weaken us.” Nor were they willing to allow it to act with impunity on its neighbours’ territory.
Unanimously rejected
The word “condemnation” was avoided, but South American governments unanimously “rejected” Colombia’s incursion. The United States supported Bogotá in the name of the “war on terror.” Craig Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, explained: “What we have said is firstly that a state must defend itself against the threat of terrorism and that when you talk about a border, you have to consider the general context, which [in this case] is a continual violation of the borders by the FARC.” An interviewer asked: “Does that mean that, for example, if Mexico pursued drug traffickers into the US, the United States wouldn’t have any objection to Mexican forces entering its territory?” Kelly replied: “I’m not going to get into a theoretical discussion.”
There has been speculation about the planes used on 1 March. Five Brazilian-made Supertucanos EMB314s and three US-manufactured A-37 attack aircraft have been mentioned, but the bombs couldn’t have been released from either of those planes. One thing is certain: Weapons of the same sophisticated kind did a lot of damage during the US invasion of Iraq.
The long arm of Washington was also discernible when Correa made other discoveries, notably that his military command had lied to him. Tension peaked when General Jorge Gabela, the Ecuadorian air force commander, revealed that the radar nearest to Santa Rosa, the zone where the FARC camp was located, had been down for maintenance for several days. Correa sacked the head of the army’s intelligence services, Colonel Mario Pazmiño, and announced in a broadcast to the nation that “the CIA has totally infiltrated some of Ecuador’s military intelligence bodies.” He also replaced defence minister Wellington Sandoval with loyalist Javier Ponce. Correa’s reassertion of his authority also led to the resignations of the joint chief of staff and the heads of the army, navy and air force.
Correa soon began to see the consequences of his actions. He had announced in his election campaign that he would close the US base at Manta. The lease on this “foreign operating location” granted to the United States in 1999 expires in 2009. On 28 February the assembly set up to “refound the country” adopted an article which asserts that “Ecuador is a land of peace; foreign military bases or foreign installations with military purpose will not be allowed.” With its state-of-the-art technology, Manta plays a key role in US military support for Colombia. During the operation on 1 March it would have controlled the air space the mystery planes overflew.
Opening salvo
The Colombian government announced that during the raid its army had seized a laptop (later increased to three laptops) belonging to Reyes, which revealed that both Chávez and Correa have close links to the FARC.
In the absence of hard evidence, questions arise. Reyes’ main camp is known to be in Colombia near the border. In that region the FARC have many hiding places, secret shelters and secondary camps. Yet the guerrilla leader had apparently gone to Ecuador with three laptops, two hard drives and three USB drives -- everything but the kitchen sink. According to the Ecuadorian army, the 10 missiles made craters 2.4m wide and 1.8m deep and destroyed the vegetation all around, yet the computers emerged without a scratch.
What a tale those laptops told. The Spanish daily El PaÃs, which is the spearhead of a campaign against the progressive governments of Latin America, didn’t stop to question the authenticity of the revelations. On 12 March its readers learned in an article, “FARC finds refuge in Ecuador,” that “guerrillas drive around the north of Ecuador in vans, as a member of the OEA (Organisation of American States) attested. He privately expressed astonishment at encountering fully equipped guerrillas in restaurants in border country.”
What readers didn’t see was a letter sent to the editor of El PaÃs on 15 March by the OEA’s secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, in which he expressed his “astonishment and indignation”: “I can assure you that this claim is absolutely false. The OEA does not have special missions, nor does it have representatives at any level deployed on Ecuador’s northern border, therefore it is impossible that any member of the organisation could have made such a statement.”
Reyes and his guerrillas were in Ecuador. Reyes had for months been the key contact for the representatives from France, Spain, Venezuela and Ecuador negotiating hostage releases, including that of the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt. The FARC have long been intransigent over their demand for direct dialogue with the Colombian government. They insisted on “humanitarian exchange” -- hostages for guerrillas -- or nothing. Their aim is political: to achieve the status of legitimate combatants by gaining recognition from the Colombian government. The FARC have been on the list of terrorist organisations since 2002 but have never accepted that they are terrorists. Uribe wanted to avoid giving them recognition at all costs.
Chávez mediates
The mediation which Chávez set in motion on 31 August 2007 broke a stalemate that had lasted since 2002. The guerrillas freed seven hostages unconditionally, leading Caracas to say: “The FARC are using a more political logic, which is a positive sign for how things could develop.” But hostages warmly thanking members of the Venezuelan government dressed in red must have been a great source of irritation to the Colombian president.
Open dialogue had been ongoing in Caracas through the intermediary of FARC leaders Iván Marquez and Rodrigo Granda, and sometimes even with Reyes at the camp in Ecuador. The French and Ecuador governments knew this. A troubling detail is that a week before the 1 March raid, French representatives met Colombia’s High Commissioner for Peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo, in Panama. Restrepo told them they should stay in contact with Reyes. “He’s the one who can help you. He’s your man. He can help you get Ingrid freed.” This explains Correa’s fury: “Look how low Alvaro Uribe has sunk! He knew that in March 12 hostages were going to be freed, including Ingrid Betancourt. He knew that, and still he used his contacts to spring this trap.” Kill the negotiator and you kill the negotiation.
But the hostage aspect of this crisis took second place to the revelations at a news conference on 3 March by the director general of the Colombian police, General Oscar Naranjo. He revealed that, based on computer equipment found near Reyes’ body, there was an “armed alliance” between the FARC and the Venezuelan government, as well as political and economic links between Correa and the guerrillas from the time of his election campaign.
Media revelation
The media went to town with these “explosive documents” from the seized computers, which the Colombian intelligence services had helpfully filtered. Prominent were the Spanish El PaÃs and the Colombian daily El Tiempo, which is owned by the Santos family, to which both the vice-president and the defence minister belong. On 4 March El PaÃs ran with “Bogotá unmasks the FARC’s support”. On 10 May, in the first of a series of articles by Maite Rico, “The FARC papers point the finger at Chávez”, readers learnt that “without raising an eyebrow Chávez approved a request for $300m” from the guerrillas. On 12 May the article condemned by the secretary general of OEA appeared. The day before Rico had written of “groups linked to Chávism which regularly train in FARC camps in Venezuela”. There were even claims of waiting lists to take part in their courses.
When The Economist wrote about Chávez’s generosity in providing $300m to the FARC on 24 May, it mentioned as its source a message from Raúl Reyes reproduced in El PaÃs and the Colombian weekly Semana. It also quoted from a document obtained by the Wall Street Journal: “The Venezuelan interior minister, Ramón RodrÃguez ChacÃn, asked the FARC to train Venezuelan soldiers in guerrilla tactics.” It’s unclear whether the Wall Street Journal copied the Miami Herald, which printed the same claim.
The improbable was followed by the bizarre: between 2000 and 2002, the FARC and ETA allegedly planned an attack in Madrid on prominent Colombian figures -- the current vice-president Francisco Santos Calderón, the former head of state, Andrés Pastrana, and the former ambassador in Spain Noemi SanÃn (El Tiempo, 2 June). BBC Mundo reported on 5 March that the FARC had tried to get hold of uranium to make a dirty bomb.
According to the Reyes documents, Chávez’s friendship with the Colombian rebels dated back at least as far as 1992. When he was imprisoned for a failed coup attempt in February that year, he received $150,000 from the FARC (Le Figaro, 5 March and Wall Street Journal, 11 March). He must have spent it all in the prison canteen, because when he was released in 1994, he had no money and had to stay in a small apartment in central Caracas belonging to his future minister of the interior, Luis Miquilena, who also lent him a car.
Though it was more cautious, Le Monde ran a piece on 12 March about a FARC deserter: “According to the deserter, the FARC leader Iván Marquez and its commander-in-chief Manuel Marulanda are staying in Venezuela.” That will stick in the reader’s mind, as will the Figaro heading “Dangerous liaisons between the FARC and Chávez” (15 May).
In Venezuela, the dailies El Nacional and El Universal, along with the private channels Radio Caracas Télévisión (RCTV) and Globovisión, are having a field day. They are only too happy to broadcast the views of the governor of Zulia state or the former presidential candidate Manuel Rosales, accusing president Chávez of betraying the country.
One of the many editorials in the Washington Post about Venezuela sums up this media firestorm: “If managed correctly, the laptop scandal will surely deepen the domestic political hole into which the would-be ‘Bolivarian’ revolutionary is sinking.”
Verified by Interpol
Throughout, Bogotá and the media have relied on a seemingly unimpeachable line of defence: the validity of seized documents has been verified by Interpol. And yet, closer examination yields interesting results.
General Naranjo requested Interpol’s independent opinion of the eight key “exhibits” (the computer equipment) on 4 March. Interpol’s report was presented in Bogotá on 15 May by its secretary general, the American Ronald Noble. He paid extensive tribute at his press conference to General Naranjo, who was seated beside him, and to the Department of State Security (DAS), the political police. Naranjo, the former head of the Colombian anti-drug police, had to stand down after his brother, Juan David, was arrested in Germany in March 2007 for drug trafficking. He was implicated by the Venezuelan interior minister for his links with the “narco” Wilmer Varela (assassinated on 29 February). As for the DAS, its former director, Jorge Noguera, was arrested on 22 February 2007 for allowing paramilitaries to use its resources.
According to Noble’s report and statements, Interpol’s role was limited to “(a) determining the actual data contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits, (b) verifying whether the user files had been modified in any way on or after 1 March 2008, and (c) determining whether Colombian law enforcement authorities had handled and examined the eight seized FARC computer exhibits in conformity with internationally recognised principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement.” But “the remit of the IRT and Interpol’s subsequent assistance to Colombia’s investigation did not include the analysis of the content of documents, folders or other material on the eight seized FARC computer exhibits. The accuracy and source of the user files contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits are and always have been outside the scope of Interpol’s computer forensic examination.”
Interpol’s team of experts, who came from Singapore and Australia and didn’t speak Spanish, didn’t examine the contents of the files. Perhaps this is understandable: In the 609.6 gigabytes in the eight “exhibits” there were 37,873 text documents, 452 spreadsheets, 210,888 images, 22,481 web pages, 7,989 email addresses (no reference to emails, though they were widely quoted in the media), and 983 encrypted files. “In non-technical terms, such a volume of data would correspond to 39.5 million full pages in Microsoft Word format and… would take more than a thousand years to go through it all at a rate of a hundred pages per day.”
That’s a lot of data for one man to produce. Especially Raúl Reyes, constantly on the move in the jungle, living the dangerous life of a guerrilla. But it wasn’t too much data for the Colombian government, which within a few hours had begun releasing a continuous stream of revelations from the files. Nor was it too much for journalists who wove the documents (authenticated by Interpol) into their own stories.
A troubling lack of rigour
The Interpol report shows a troubling lack of rigour. It says Reyes and Guillermo Enrique Torres, alias Julián Conrado, a FARC commander, were killed in the operation (page 10). But Bogotá, which had announced the death of Conrado on 1 March, had to retract that after a DNA examination of the only body (apart from Reyes) brought back by their forces. Similarly, the statement “FARC has been designated a terrorist organisation by Colombia, other governments and Interpol” (page 10) requires qualification. The designation has only been adopted by the US, Colombia, Peru, the EU, and Israel (31 countries in all), or 17% of the 186 countries that are Interpol members.
More significantly, the statement: “the eight seized FARC computer exhibits belonged to Raúl Reyes” or: “the eight seized FARC computer exhibits” (both page 10) should more properly have been: “the eight exhibits given to Interpol by the Colombian authorities.” Interpol has accepted the Colombian version of events, though there was no witness present to verify that the equipment was actually found near the body of the FARC leader. This provoked Correa to say on 13 May when he visited Paris: “Who can show that the computers were indeed found in the FARC camp?”
In the first fax Naranjo sent on 4 March to request Interpol help, he mentioned “three computers and three USB devices” (Appendix 2 of the report). In his reply of 5 March, Noble agrees on behalf of his organisation to examine “three computers and three USB keys” (Appendix 3). But on 6 March, in a letter to Interpol from the director of DAS, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, the equipment has become “three laptop computers, the three USB keys and [for the first time] two hard-disc drives” (Appendix 4). Where did these hard drives come from? Had no one noticed them before?
The overall conclusion of the report is that “no data were created, added, modified or deleted on any of the these exhibits between 3 March 2008 at 11.45 am [the date and time when they were entrusted to the computer forensic specialists of the Colombian Judicial Police] and 10 March 2008 when the exhibits were handed over to Interpol’s experts to make their image discs” (page 29). It also states that “access to the data… [during the same period] conformed to internationally recognised principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement” (page 28).
But what happened between 1 March and 3 March? An officer of Colombia’s anti-terrorist unit “directly accessed the eight seized FARC computer exhibits under exigent and time-sensitive circumstances” (page 30) and they were all connected to a computer “without prior imaging of their contents and without the use of write-blocking hardware” (page 31). As a result of this, during those three days, “access to data . . . did not conform to internationally recognised principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement” (page 8). This is not insignificant, as Interpol discovered that a total of 48,055 files “had either been created, accessed, modified or deleted as a result of the direct access to the eight seized exhibits by Colombian authorities between the time of their seizure on 1 March 2008 and 3 March 2008 at 11.45am” (page 33).
No court of law anywhere could rely on the results of such a report to pass judgment on anyone. But that doesn’t stop the rumours or the headlines. The rumour mills are now turning in Ecuador and Venezuela. Even if today the conditions are not yet right for Venezuela to be classed as a terrorist or rogue state, this campaign is creating the right conditions in public opinion. According to Maximilien Arvelaiz, an adviser to President Chávez: “George Bush wants to leave behind a time bomb so that, whatever the outcome of the election in November, it will be very difficult to soften US policy on Venezuela.”
But an unforeseen turn of events can never be ruled out -- as has been shown by the spectacular, surprise release by Colombian troops of the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, held for years by FARC guerrillas in jungle captivity.
Maurice Lemoine is a journalist and writer, and an expert on the Latin American political scene. -- Translated by George Miller.
© 2008 Le Monde diplomatique
by Maurice Lemoine
The first of 10 smart bombs guided by GPS hit its target at 00.25 on 1 March 2008, less than two kilometres from the Ecuador-Colombia border, along the Putomayo river. Four Blackhawk OH-60 helicopters appeared out of the darkness with 44 special commandos from Colombia’s rapid deployment force on board. But there was no fighting: The temporary camp of the FARC (the Marxist-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) had been destroyed by the explosions and 23 people killed in their sleep. Among them was Raúl Reyes, the FARC’s second-in-command and the group’s “foreign minister.” His remains were taken back to Colombia by ground troops as a trophy.
Early that morning Colombian president Alvaro Uribe contacted his Ecuadorian counterpart, Rafael Correa, to brief him on the raid: The Colombian airborne unit had been attacked from within Ecuador and had pursued the rebels in legitimate self-defence. But, he assured Correa, their return of fire came from Colombian territory and didn’t violate Ecuador’s airspace. Colombia’s defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, gave the same assurance later.
Initially Correa took Uribe at his word. Until this incident they had been on good terms and spoke on the phone every day. Two weeks before, Correa had said in private to one of the close advisers of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez: “Tell Chávez that I get on very well with Uribe and that if he wants I can help smooth things out between them.” Correa felt betrayed, a feeling compounded when Ecuadorian military personnel arrived at the bombed camp: not only had the Colombians violated Ecuadorian territory, they had also, as Correa put it in a press conference on 2 March, conducted “a massacre”.
Reyes’ death sparked a crisis. Ecuador severed diplomatic relations with Colombia and deployed 11,000 men along its border. Venezuela also sent 10 battalions to its border. “We don’t want war,” Chávez warned, “but we won’t allow the [North American] empire, nor its little dog [Colombia], to weaken us.” Nor were they willing to allow it to act with impunity on its neighbours’ territory.
Unanimously rejected
The word “condemnation” was avoided, but South American governments unanimously “rejected” Colombia’s incursion. The United States supported Bogotá in the name of the “war on terror.” Craig Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, explained: “What we have said is firstly that a state must defend itself against the threat of terrorism and that when you talk about a border, you have to consider the general context, which [in this case] is a continual violation of the borders by the FARC.” An interviewer asked: “Does that mean that, for example, if Mexico pursued drug traffickers into the US, the United States wouldn’t have any objection to Mexican forces entering its territory?” Kelly replied: “I’m not going to get into a theoretical discussion.”
There has been speculation about the planes used on 1 March. Five Brazilian-made Supertucanos EMB314s and three US-manufactured A-37 attack aircraft have been mentioned, but the bombs couldn’t have been released from either of those planes. One thing is certain: Weapons of the same sophisticated kind did a lot of damage during the US invasion of Iraq.
The long arm of Washington was also discernible when Correa made other discoveries, notably that his military command had lied to him. Tension peaked when General Jorge Gabela, the Ecuadorian air force commander, revealed that the radar nearest to Santa Rosa, the zone where the FARC camp was located, had been down for maintenance for several days. Correa sacked the head of the army’s intelligence services, Colonel Mario Pazmiño, and announced in a broadcast to the nation that “the CIA has totally infiltrated some of Ecuador’s military intelligence bodies.” He also replaced defence minister Wellington Sandoval with loyalist Javier Ponce. Correa’s reassertion of his authority also led to the resignations of the joint chief of staff and the heads of the army, navy and air force.
Correa soon began to see the consequences of his actions. He had announced in his election campaign that he would close the US base at Manta. The lease on this “foreign operating location” granted to the United States in 1999 expires in 2009. On 28 February the assembly set up to “refound the country” adopted an article which asserts that “Ecuador is a land of peace; foreign military bases or foreign installations with military purpose will not be allowed.” With its state-of-the-art technology, Manta plays a key role in US military support for Colombia. During the operation on 1 March it would have controlled the air space the mystery planes overflew.
Opening salvo
The Colombian government announced that during the raid its army had seized a laptop (later increased to three laptops) belonging to Reyes, which revealed that both Chávez and Correa have close links to the FARC.
In the absence of hard evidence, questions arise. Reyes’ main camp is known to be in Colombia near the border. In that region the FARC have many hiding places, secret shelters and secondary camps. Yet the guerrilla leader had apparently gone to Ecuador with three laptops, two hard drives and three USB drives -- everything but the kitchen sink. According to the Ecuadorian army, the 10 missiles made craters 2.4m wide and 1.8m deep and destroyed the vegetation all around, yet the computers emerged without a scratch.
What a tale those laptops told. The Spanish daily El PaÃs, which is the spearhead of a campaign against the progressive governments of Latin America, didn’t stop to question the authenticity of the revelations. On 12 March its readers learned in an article, “FARC finds refuge in Ecuador,” that “guerrillas drive around the north of Ecuador in vans, as a member of the OEA (Organisation of American States) attested. He privately expressed astonishment at encountering fully equipped guerrillas in restaurants in border country.”
What readers didn’t see was a letter sent to the editor of El PaÃs on 15 March by the OEA’s secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, in which he expressed his “astonishment and indignation”: “I can assure you that this claim is absolutely false. The OEA does not have special missions, nor does it have representatives at any level deployed on Ecuador’s northern border, therefore it is impossible that any member of the organisation could have made such a statement.”
Reyes and his guerrillas were in Ecuador. Reyes had for months been the key contact for the representatives from France, Spain, Venezuela and Ecuador negotiating hostage releases, including that of the French-Colombian Ingrid Betancourt. The FARC have long been intransigent over their demand for direct dialogue with the Colombian government. They insisted on “humanitarian exchange” -- hostages for guerrillas -- or nothing. Their aim is political: to achieve the status of legitimate combatants by gaining recognition from the Colombian government. The FARC have been on the list of terrorist organisations since 2002 but have never accepted that they are terrorists. Uribe wanted to avoid giving them recognition at all costs.
Chávez mediates
The mediation which Chávez set in motion on 31 August 2007 broke a stalemate that had lasted since 2002. The guerrillas freed seven hostages unconditionally, leading Caracas to say: “The FARC are using a more political logic, which is a positive sign for how things could develop.” But hostages warmly thanking members of the Venezuelan government dressed in red must have been a great source of irritation to the Colombian president.
Open dialogue had been ongoing in Caracas through the intermediary of FARC leaders Iván Marquez and Rodrigo Granda, and sometimes even with Reyes at the camp in Ecuador. The French and Ecuador governments knew this. A troubling detail is that a week before the 1 March raid, French representatives met Colombia’s High Commissioner for Peace, Luis Carlos Restrepo, in Panama. Restrepo told them they should stay in contact with Reyes. “He’s the one who can help you. He’s your man. He can help you get Ingrid freed.” This explains Correa’s fury: “Look how low Alvaro Uribe has sunk! He knew that in March 12 hostages were going to be freed, including Ingrid Betancourt. He knew that, and still he used his contacts to spring this trap.” Kill the negotiator and you kill the negotiation.
But the hostage aspect of this crisis took second place to the revelations at a news conference on 3 March by the director general of the Colombian police, General Oscar Naranjo. He revealed that, based on computer equipment found near Reyes’ body, there was an “armed alliance” between the FARC and the Venezuelan government, as well as political and economic links between Correa and the guerrillas from the time of his election campaign.
Media revelation
The media went to town with these “explosive documents” from the seized computers, which the Colombian intelligence services had helpfully filtered. Prominent were the Spanish El PaÃs and the Colombian daily El Tiempo, which is owned by the Santos family, to which both the vice-president and the defence minister belong. On 4 March El PaÃs ran with “Bogotá unmasks the FARC’s support”. On 10 May, in the first of a series of articles by Maite Rico, “The FARC papers point the finger at Chávez”, readers learnt that “without raising an eyebrow Chávez approved a request for $300m” from the guerrillas. On 12 May the article condemned by the secretary general of OEA appeared. The day before Rico had written of “groups linked to Chávism which regularly train in FARC camps in Venezuela”. There were even claims of waiting lists to take part in their courses.
When The Economist wrote about Chávez’s generosity in providing $300m to the FARC on 24 May, it mentioned as its source a message from Raúl Reyes reproduced in El PaÃs and the Colombian weekly Semana. It also quoted from a document obtained by the Wall Street Journal: “The Venezuelan interior minister, Ramón RodrÃguez ChacÃn, asked the FARC to train Venezuelan soldiers in guerrilla tactics.” It’s unclear whether the Wall Street Journal copied the Miami Herald, which printed the same claim.
The improbable was followed by the bizarre: between 2000 and 2002, the FARC and ETA allegedly planned an attack in Madrid on prominent Colombian figures -- the current vice-president Francisco Santos Calderón, the former head of state, Andrés Pastrana, and the former ambassador in Spain Noemi SanÃn (El Tiempo, 2 June). BBC Mundo reported on 5 March that the FARC had tried to get hold of uranium to make a dirty bomb.
According to the Reyes documents, Chávez’s friendship with the Colombian rebels dated back at least as far as 1992. When he was imprisoned for a failed coup attempt in February that year, he received $150,000 from the FARC (Le Figaro, 5 March and Wall Street Journal, 11 March). He must have spent it all in the prison canteen, because when he was released in 1994, he had no money and had to stay in a small apartment in central Caracas belonging to his future minister of the interior, Luis Miquilena, who also lent him a car.
Though it was more cautious, Le Monde ran a piece on 12 March about a FARC deserter: “According to the deserter, the FARC leader Iván Marquez and its commander-in-chief Manuel Marulanda are staying in Venezuela.” That will stick in the reader’s mind, as will the Figaro heading “Dangerous liaisons between the FARC and Chávez” (15 May).
In Venezuela, the dailies El Nacional and El Universal, along with the private channels Radio Caracas Télévisión (RCTV) and Globovisión, are having a field day. They are only too happy to broadcast the views of the governor of Zulia state or the former presidential candidate Manuel Rosales, accusing president Chávez of betraying the country.
One of the many editorials in the Washington Post about Venezuela sums up this media firestorm: “If managed correctly, the laptop scandal will surely deepen the domestic political hole into which the would-be ‘Bolivarian’ revolutionary is sinking.”
Verified by Interpol
Throughout, Bogotá and the media have relied on a seemingly unimpeachable line of defence: the validity of seized documents has been verified by Interpol. And yet, closer examination yields interesting results.
General Naranjo requested Interpol’s independent opinion of the eight key “exhibits” (the computer equipment) on 4 March. Interpol’s report was presented in Bogotá on 15 May by its secretary general, the American Ronald Noble. He paid extensive tribute at his press conference to General Naranjo, who was seated beside him, and to the Department of State Security (DAS), the political police. Naranjo, the former head of the Colombian anti-drug police, had to stand down after his brother, Juan David, was arrested in Germany in March 2007 for drug trafficking. He was implicated by the Venezuelan interior minister for his links with the “narco” Wilmer Varela (assassinated on 29 February). As for the DAS, its former director, Jorge Noguera, was arrested on 22 February 2007 for allowing paramilitaries to use its resources.
According to Noble’s report and statements, Interpol’s role was limited to “(a) determining the actual data contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits, (b) verifying whether the user files had been modified in any way on or after 1 March 2008, and (c) determining whether Colombian law enforcement authorities had handled and examined the eight seized FARC computer exhibits in conformity with internationally recognised principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement.” But “the remit of the IRT and Interpol’s subsequent assistance to Colombia’s investigation did not include the analysis of the content of documents, folders or other material on the eight seized FARC computer exhibits. The accuracy and source of the user files contained in the eight seized FARC computer exhibits are and always have been outside the scope of Interpol’s computer forensic examination.”
Interpol’s team of experts, who came from Singapore and Australia and didn’t speak Spanish, didn’t examine the contents of the files. Perhaps this is understandable: In the 609.6 gigabytes in the eight “exhibits” there were 37,873 text documents, 452 spreadsheets, 210,888 images, 22,481 web pages, 7,989 email addresses (no reference to emails, though they were widely quoted in the media), and 983 encrypted files. “In non-technical terms, such a volume of data would correspond to 39.5 million full pages in Microsoft Word format and… would take more than a thousand years to go through it all at a rate of a hundred pages per day.”
That’s a lot of data for one man to produce. Especially Raúl Reyes, constantly on the move in the jungle, living the dangerous life of a guerrilla. But it wasn’t too much data for the Colombian government, which within a few hours had begun releasing a continuous stream of revelations from the files. Nor was it too much for journalists who wove the documents (authenticated by Interpol) into their own stories.
A troubling lack of rigour
The Interpol report shows a troubling lack of rigour. It says Reyes and Guillermo Enrique Torres, alias Julián Conrado, a FARC commander, were killed in the operation (page 10). But Bogotá, which had announced the death of Conrado on 1 March, had to retract that after a DNA examination of the only body (apart from Reyes) brought back by their forces. Similarly, the statement “FARC has been designated a terrorist organisation by Colombia, other governments and Interpol” (page 10) requires qualification. The designation has only been adopted by the US, Colombia, Peru, the EU, and Israel (31 countries in all), or 17% of the 186 countries that are Interpol members.
More significantly, the statement: “the eight seized FARC computer exhibits belonged to Raúl Reyes” or: “the eight seized FARC computer exhibits” (both page 10) should more properly have been: “the eight exhibits given to Interpol by the Colombian authorities.” Interpol has accepted the Colombian version of events, though there was no witness present to verify that the equipment was actually found near the body of the FARC leader. This provoked Correa to say on 13 May when he visited Paris: “Who can show that the computers were indeed found in the FARC camp?”
In the first fax Naranjo sent on 4 March to request Interpol help, he mentioned “three computers and three USB devices” (Appendix 2 of the report). In his reply of 5 March, Noble agrees on behalf of his organisation to examine “three computers and three USB keys” (Appendix 3). But on 6 March, in a letter to Interpol from the director of DAS, Maria del Pilar Hurtado, the equipment has become “three laptop computers, the three USB keys and [for the first time] two hard-disc drives” (Appendix 4). Where did these hard drives come from? Had no one noticed them before?
The overall conclusion of the report is that “no data were created, added, modified or deleted on any of the these exhibits between 3 March 2008 at 11.45 am [the date and time when they were entrusted to the computer forensic specialists of the Colombian Judicial Police] and 10 March 2008 when the exhibits were handed over to Interpol’s experts to make their image discs” (page 29). It also states that “access to the data… [during the same period] conformed to internationally recognised principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement” (page 28).
But what happened between 1 March and 3 March? An officer of Colombia’s anti-terrorist unit “directly accessed the eight seized FARC computer exhibits under exigent and time-sensitive circumstances” (page 30) and they were all connected to a computer “without prior imaging of their contents and without the use of write-blocking hardware” (page 31). As a result of this, during those three days, “access to data . . . did not conform to internationally recognised principles for handling electronic evidence by law enforcement” (page 8). This is not insignificant, as Interpol discovered that a total of 48,055 files “had either been created, accessed, modified or deleted as a result of the direct access to the eight seized exhibits by Colombian authorities between the time of their seizure on 1 March 2008 and 3 March 2008 at 11.45am” (page 33).
No court of law anywhere could rely on the results of such a report to pass judgment on anyone. But that doesn’t stop the rumours or the headlines. The rumour mills are now turning in Ecuador and Venezuela. Even if today the conditions are not yet right for Venezuela to be classed as a terrorist or rogue state, this campaign is creating the right conditions in public opinion. According to Maximilien Arvelaiz, an adviser to President Chávez: “George Bush wants to leave behind a time bomb so that, whatever the outcome of the election in November, it will be very difficult to soften US policy on Venezuela.”
But an unforeseen turn of events can never be ruled out -- as has been shown by the spectacular, surprise release by Colombian troops of the French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, held for years by FARC guerrillas in jungle captivity.
Maurice Lemoine is a journalist and writer, and an expert on the Latin American political scene. -- Translated by George Miller.
© 2008 Le Monde diplomatique
Behind Haiti's Food Crisis
A dynamite, 17-minute story by Avi Lewis was broadcast on Al Jazeera on July 4 and is posted to You Tube. Please watch it and make it known. Patrick Elie is one of those interviewed for the story.
Solidarity,
Haiti Solidarity BC
"From the food market in Port au Prince, I'm Avi Lewis. We look at Washington's role in Haiti's food crisis."
Monday, July 07, 2008
Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion
lookout-The Nation
by Naomi Klein
This article appeared in the July 21, 2008 edition of The Nation.
July 1, 2008
Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly right-wing media hosts had to prove their populist cred by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: "disaster capitalism."
It usually goes well--until it doesn't.
For instance, "independent conservative" radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: "I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down," Doyle announced. "We've invested $650 billion to liberate a nation of 25 million people. Shouldn't we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the Stinkin' Lincoln, at rush hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government.... Why don't we just take the oil? We've invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in ten days, not ten years."
There were a couple of problems with Doyle's plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stickup in world history. The second, that he was too late: "We" are already heisting Iraq's oil, or at least are on the cusp of doing so.
It's been ten months since the publication of my book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which I argue that today's preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multinational corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis. With the globe being rocked by multiple shocks, this seems like a good time to see how and where the strategy is being applied.
And the disaster capitalists have been busy--from private firefighters already on the scene in Northern California's wildfires, to land grabs in cyclone-hit Burma, to the housing bill making its way through Congress. The bill contains little in the way of affordable housing, shifts the burden of mortgage default to taxpayers and makes sure that the banks that made bad loans get some payouts. No wonder it is known in the hallways of Congress as "The Credit Suisse Plan," after one of the banks that generously proposed it.
Iraq Disaster: We Broke It, We (Just) Bought It
But these cases of disaster capitalism are amateurish compared with what is unfolding at Iraq's oil ministry. It started with no-bid service contracts announced for ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total (they have yet to be signed but are still on course). Paying multinationals for their technical expertise is not unusual. What is odd is that such contracts almost invariably go to oil service companies--not to the oil majors, whose work is exploring, producing and owning carbon wealth. As London-based oil expert Greg Muttitt points out, the contracts make sense only in the context of reports that the oil majors have insisted on the right of first refusal on subsequent contracts handed out to manage and produce Iraq's oil fields. In other words, other companies will be free to bid on those future contracts, but these companies will win.
One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of back-room arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oil fields, accounting for around half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq's oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms will keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25 percent for their Iraqi partners.
That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anticolonial struggles. According to Muttitt, the assumption until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop brand-new fields in Iraq--not to take over ones that are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. "The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company," he told me. This is a total reversal of that policy, giving INOC a mere 25 percent instead of the planned 100 percent.
So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Ironically, it is Iraq's suffering--its never-ending crisis--that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain its treasury of its main source of revenue. The logic goes like this: Iraq's oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology and the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq urgently needs to start producing more oil. Why? Again because of the war. The country is shattered, and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to Western firms have failed to rebuild the country. And that's where the new no-bid contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.
Several of the architects of the Iraq War no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator. On National Public Radio's To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as "a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future." Chalabi, who served as Iraq's oil under secretary and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as "a primary objective."
Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That means that the huge task of rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure--including its oil infrastructure--is the financial responsibility of Iraq's invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations. (Recall that Saddam Hussein's regime paid $9 billion to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion.) Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75 percent of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.
Oil Price Shock: Give Us the Arctic or Never Drive Again
Iraq isn't the only country in the midst of an oil-related stickup. The Bush Administration is busily using a related crisis--the soaring price of fuel--to revive its dream of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And of drilling offshore. And in the rock-solid shale of the Green River Basin. "Congress must face a hard reality," said George W. Bush on June 18. "Unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today's painful levels--or even higher--our nation must produce more oil."
This is the President as Extortionist in Chief, with gas nozzle pointed to the head of his hostage--which happens to be the entire country. Give me ANWR, or everyone has to spend their summer vacations in the backyard. A final stickup from the cowboy President.
Despite the Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less bumper stickers, drilling in ANWR would have little discernible impact on actual global oil supplies, as its advocates well know. The argument that it could nonetheless bring down oil prices is based not on hard economics but on market psychoanalysis: drilling would "send a message" to the oil traders that more oil is on the way, which would cause them to start betting down the price.
Two points follow from this approach. First, trying to psych out hyperactive commodity traders is what passes for governing in the Bush era, even in the midst of a national emergency. Second, it will never work. If there is one thing we can predict from the oil market's recent behavior, it is that the price is going to keep going up regardless of what new supplies are announced.
Take the massive oil boom under way in Alberta's notorious tar sands. The tar sands (sometimes called the oil sands) have the same things going for them as Bush's proposed drill sites: they are nearby and perfectly secure, since the North American Free Trade Agreement contains a provision barring Canada from cutting off supply to the United States. And with little fanfare, oil from this largely untapped source has been pouring into the market, so much so that Canada is now the largest supplier of oil to the United States, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Between 2005 and 2007, Canada increased its exports to the States by almost 100 million barrels. Yet despite this significant increase in secure supplies, oil prices have been going up the entire time.
What is driving the ANWR push is not facts but pure shock doctrine strategy--the oil crisis has created the conditions in which it is possible to sell a previously unsellable (but highly profitable) policy.
Food Price Shock: Genetic Modification or Starvation
Intimately connected to the price of oil is the global food crisis. Not only do high gas prices drive up food costs but the boom in agrofuels has blurred the line between food and fuel, pushing food growers off their land and encouraging rampant speculation. Several Latin American countries have been pushing to re-examine the push for agrofuels and to have food recognized as a human right, not a mere commodity. United States Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte has other ideas. In the same speech touting the US commitment to emergency food aid, he called on countries to lower their "export restrictions and high tariffs" and eliminate "barriers to use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology." This was an admittedly more subtle stickup, but the message was clear: impoverished countries had better crack open their agricultural markets to American products and genetically modified seeds, or they could risk having their aid cut off.
Genetically modified crops have emerged as the cureall for the food crisis, at least according to the World Bank, the European Commission president (time to "bite the bullet") and Prime Minister of Britain Gordon Brown. And, of course, the agribusiness companies. "You cannot today feed the world without genetically modified organisms," Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé, told the Financial Times recently. The problem with this argument, at least for now, is that there is no evidence that GMOs increase crop yields, and they often decrease them.
But even if there was a simple key to solving the global food crisis, would we really want it in the hands of the Nestlés and Monsantos? What would it cost us to use it? In recent months Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF have been frenetically buying up patents on so-called "climate ready" seeds--plants that can grow in earth parched from drought and salinated from flooding.
In other words, plants built to survive a future of climate chaos. We already know the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its intellectual property, spying on and suing farmers who dare to save their seeds from one year to the next. We have seen patented AIDS medications fail to treat millions in sub-Saharan Africa. Why would patented "climate ready" crops be any different?
Meanwhile, amid all the talk of exciting new genetic and drilling technologies, the Bush Administration announced a moratorium of up to two years on new solar energy projects on federal lands--due, apparently, to environmental concerns. This is the final frontier for disaster capitalism. Our leaders are failing to invest in technology that will actually prevent a future of climate chaos, choosing instead to work hand in hand with those plotting innovative schemes to profit from the mayhem.
Privatizing Iraq's oil, ensuring global dominance for genetically modified crops, lowering the last of the trade barriers and opening the last of the wildlife refuges... Not so long ago, those goals were pursued through polite trade agreements, under the benign pseudonym "globalization." Now this discredited agenda is forced to ride on the backs of serial crises, selling itself as lifesaving medicine for a world in pain.
source
About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002).
Canada Needs a Free Press
Please join us at a small Corporate Media event
Why? To tell our local Corporate Media that we want honest news - and the truth - from them ... not just the Corporate news and the Corporate truth. And to give our fellow citizens the same message ... that democracy cannot long survive without a free press, and one of the greatest threats to our democracy is Corporate ownership of the media.
When? Tuesday, July 8, from 10 AM to 10:45 ... short and sweet
Where? 1420 Broad St. The home of A-Channel TV and CFAX Radio. These are 2 members of our local Corporate Media, both owned by CTV-GlobeMedia, one of the large conglomerates that own and control almost all of Canada's radio, TV, and daily papers - CTV GlobeMedia is controlled by Canada's wealthiest family, the Thomsons.
What? Peaceful and friendly. We'll have a few signs. We'll present management with a letter outlining our concerns. It's a busy corner and lots of people can see us. AND, we'll be sending out a press release to virtually all the media in BC and the major players nation-wide (both Corporate and Free) so hopefully word will get out about this event and the desperate need for citizen awareness and real change.
Winning our battles - on social issues, environmental issues, political, economic or health issues - is going to be almost impossible until we can get our own media, or at least let people know that the existing media has been almost totally corrupted and should not be trusted or believed in any way...
The Corporations know exactly how important 'mainstream' Media is ... that's why they own it.
So please join us in this ongoing fight for democracy.
RSVP if you can ... but please attend anyways. Tuesday, July 8, 10 AM, corner of Broad and Pandora.
Any questions:
Jack Etkin
jetkino@yahoo.ca
Derek Skinner
dj76is@shaw.ca
WHY is there almost nothing in the Corporate Media about the SPP? Who has decided that we Canadians should not be told about this corporate attack on our nation? Why no coverage last month when climate scientist James Hansen of NASA, testifying before the US Congress, said that oil company CEO's should be put on trial for crimes against humanity? Is that not news? Or is it something that the corporate owners of the media have decided we should not be told?
Why is there nothing about TILMA? What about the corrupt privatization of BC Rail? How about a debate on the impact of record corporate profits on homelessness and food bank use in Canada?
What about the Agribusiness destruction of the family farm, the connection between Enron and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, the Bush family funding of Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930's? Why no questions about 911 - when our Prime Minister tells us we are at war in Afghanistan because of it? And why the never-ending coverage of crime and violence and sports and entertainment behind which the truth is kept hidden?
The Corporate Media deliberately decided not to inform us about the oncoming disaster of climate change for decades ... has never held to account the corporations that knowingly and deliberately damaged the ozone layer in the name of profit maximization. They never mention the name of Percy Schmeisser, Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, and so many other heroes.
The Corporate owners of the Media have willingly participated in the ongoing destruction of our democracy; they have a lot to answer for and they have got to be held accountable for their actions, preferably in courts of law.
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