CIA

America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

dlindorff — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:49:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of
your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose,
just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your
Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article
today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s
stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the
world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the
CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on
that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly
cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that “The
financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence
agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s war
strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.” Well,
duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in
Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about
how can the government explain this to the over 1000 soldiers and
Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan).
But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the
pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented
journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney
administration’s massive warrantless National Security Agency
electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election,
this time gave a critically important story full timely play, and even,
appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about
October being the most deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.

What the article didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear
historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air
America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian
heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that
was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where
there was a resulting heroin epidemic.

A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, as
the late investigative journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented
first in a series titled “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury
newspaper, and later in a book by that same name, the CIA was deeply
involved in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US,
which was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic—one that continues
to destroy African American and other poor communities across the
country. (The Times' role here was sordid—it and other leading papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—did
despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly trashing his work and his
career, and ultimately driving him to suicide, though his facts have
held up.) In this case, Webb showed that the Agency was actually using
the drugs as a way to fund arms, which it could use its own planes to
ferry down to the Contra forces it was backing to subvert the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had barred the US
from supporting the Contras.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the world
with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow by
US forces in 20001, had, according to the UN, virtually eliminated
opium production there), but now responsible for as much as 80 percent
of the world’s opium production—this at a time that the US effectively
finances and runs the place, with an occupying army that, together with
Afghan government forces that it controls, outnumbers the Taliban 12-1
according to a recent AP story.

The real story here is that where the US goes, the drug trade soon
follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade
appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Your tax dollars at work.

The issue at this point should not be how many troops the US should
add to its total in Afghanistan. It shouldn’t even be over whether the
US should up the ante or scale back to a more limited goal of hunting
terrorists. It should be about how quickly the US can extricate its
forces from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start hearings into
corruption and drug pushing by the CIA, and how soon the Attorney
General's office will begin a grand jury probe into the CIA's drug
dealing.

Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering and
ineffective “War on Drugs” in this country, and who mindlessly back
“zero-tolerance” policies towards drugs in schools and on the job,
should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward drugs and dealing with
drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.

For years we have been fed the story that the Taliban are being
financed by their taxes on opium farmers. That may be partly true, but
recently we’ve been learning that it’s not the real story. Taliban
forces in Afghanistan, it turns out, have been heavily subsidized by
protection money paid to them by civilian aid organizations, including
even American government-funded aid programs, and even, reportedly, by
the military forces of some of America’s NATO allies (there is
currently a scandal in Italy concerning such payments by Italian
forces). But beyond that, the opium industry, far from being controlled
by the Taliban, has been, to a great extent, controlled by the very
warlords with which the US has allied itself, and, as the Times now reports, by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s own brother.

Karzai, we are also told by Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen, was a key
player in producing hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots for his
brother’s election theft earlier this year. Left unsaid is whether the
CIA might have played a role in that scam too. In a country where
finding printing presses is sure to be difficult, and where
transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is risky, you have to wonder
whether an agency like the CIA, which has ready access to printers and
to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping its assets in control
in Kabul.

Sure that’s idle speculation on my part, but when you learn that
America’s spook agency has been keeping not just Karzai, but lots of
other unsavory Afghani warlords, on its payroll, such speculation is
only logical.

The real attitude of the CIA here was best illustrated by an
anonymous quote in the Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen piece, where a
“former CIA officer with experience in Afghanistan,” explaining the
agency’s backing of Karzai, said, “Virtually every significant Afghan
figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you are looking for
Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

“The end justifies the means” is America’s foreign policy and military motto, clearly.

The Times article exposing the CIA link to Afghanistan’s
drug-kingpin presidential brother should be the last straw for
Americans. President Obama’s “necessary” war in Afghanistan is nothing
but a sick joke.

The opium, and resulting heroin, that is flooding into Europe and
America thanks to the CIA’s active support of the industry and its
owners in Afghanistan are doing far more grave damage to our societies
than any turbaned terrorists armed with suicide bomb vests could hope
to inflict.

The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.

Let the prosecution of America’s government drug pushers begin.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Why CIA Insiders Oppose Leon Panetta

Bob Fertik — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:46:22 -0500

Josh Marshall is covering opposition to Obama's choice of Leon Panetta to head the CIA, both from within the CIA and from the outgoing and incoming Democratic chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein. What is this all about?

It is not about Panetta's qualifications. Panetta served with distinction in the Army (including intelligence work), served 8 distinguished terms in Congress, then served as OMB Director and Chief of Staff to President Clinton. As Chief of Staff, he routinely handled the most secret intelligence. In 2006, he served on the Iraq Study Group with foreign policy heavyweights like James Baker, Lee Hamilton, William Perry, Chuck Robb, and Lawrence Eagleburger. Panetta is universally respected as a smart and capable manager, in total contrast to Porter Goss. And his close ties to Obama mean the CIA's work will be taken seriously.

So what is it about? Simple: fear of accountability for torture.

Thanks to Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin and honest Pentagon brass, we know a lot about torture by the regular military. But we know very little about torture by the CIA because of the coverup by Jay Rockefeller and the corrupt CIA brass.

The CIA brass desperately want to keep everything secret because they tortured people to death, which is a war crime under U.S. and international law, and is punishable by death. JRock and DiFi want to protect the CIA brass, either out of blind professional loyalty or because they approved the torture and share in the guilt.

Leon Panetta would come in "clean" and therefore cannot be blackmailed by those who committed or approved torture. He could fire people, even refer them for prosecution. This terrifies the insiders.

That's what this is all about.

Update 1: Ryeland nails it

I don't believe for a second that Senators Feinstein and Rockefeller are objecting to the Panetta nomination out of concern for U.S. intelligence policy, or even more laughably because they feel left out of the process.

They're not just unhappy, they're worried. And they have good reason to be.

In this case, being a Bush-Enabler just might turn out to be an indictable offense. It's been clear for a while that members of the Democratic congressional leadership may share culpability for illegal acts committed by the Bush Administration.

And, really, we know enough about the Obama transition to recognize that the lack of consultation with Lady Feinstein wasn't an oversight. Her heart must have skipped a beat when she heard about Panetta. Government officials who were aware of illegal acts, who may have even expressed consent, are in deep doo-doo if somebody outside of the intelligence community, outside of the closed loop of those who know better, takes the helm of the CIA. And Feinstein must be wondering just why Obama didn't discuss the Panetta nomination with her. Well, he probably didn't discuss it with Cheney either.

Panetta's prior statements about torture and wiretapping make me hopeful that accountability is on the way. But Feinstein and Rockefeller's reactions make me downright optimistic.

Update 2: Jane Hamsher agrees:

If someone truly does come in from the outside and try to find out what happened at the CIA with regard to torture and illegal spying, the complicity and ensuing silence of this entitled crew risks exposure, and they've demonstrated they'll do just about anything to keep that from happening. That's how we got retroactive telecom immunity.

Update 3: Spencer Ackerman is right to point out that some CIA officials opposed torture, so we shouldn't tar everyone inside the CIA with the same brush. Of course the problem for outsiders is we don't know who supported it and who opposed it because they won't tell us. Ackerman wants a Congressionally-mandated investigation, but the 9/11 Commission specifically refused to play the blame game so we never learned who screwed up. The only sure way to identify the torturers within the CIA is through a Special Prosecutor.

Update 4: Ben Smith says what the Corporate Media refuses to say:

But the move drew jitters from members of the intelligence community who worry that the Justice Department could indict CIA case officers for torture.

Update 5: Scott Horton says DiFi and JRock were excluded on purpose:

So why would the Obama team, which has been so careful and thoughtful in approaching the nominations process, have failed even to consult the two Democratic senators who have the most to say about intelligence? I don’t think this was accidental. I read something else into it. The bottom line is that Jay Rockefeller was an abject failure when it came to intelligence oversight. His term as ranking member and then chair of the Senate intelligence committee was one in which Congress generally, and the Senate in particular, failed to live up to their Constitutional mandate. The intelligence community was steered by the Bush Administration into a series of criminal escapades. Effective congressional oversight would have exposed these failings and brought them to heel. But the Rockefeller-Feinstein record was little short of disastrous. I’m delighted that the Obama team didn’t consult them.

And I suspect that Panetta was chosen principally for his managerial skills, but secondarily because Obama wanted someone who would have a more powerful voice in Washington generally, and in Congressional circles in particular, than either Rockefeller or Feinstein.

Panetta’s task will be to put the agency back on firm ground in terms of policy; he will not want to micro-manage. He needs to put an end to the abuse of the agency at the hands of political hacks and ensure that its operatives go about their jobs as professionals, calling the facts as they see them and not telling the White House what it wants to hear. For eight years, while Rockefeller and Feinstein stood by, the agency was pressured by the Cheney shogunate to validate its fairy tales. This did not serve the nation’s security interest. Sober analysis that does not fear political meddling needs to be restored.

And Panetta has one other key trait. When he tells the nation and the world that the torture and mistreatment of prisoners and the program of torture by proxy has ended, people will believe him.

CIA Director Leon Panetta Opposes Torture

Bob Fertik — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:29:20 -0500

Obama's selection of Leon Panetta to head the CIA is welcome news. Panetta was a respected California congressman who headed the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton. Atrios found this important op ed written by Panetta last March:

More recently, President Bush vetoed a law that would require the CIA and all the intelligence services to abide by the same rules on torture as contained in the U.S. Army Field Manual.

But all forms of torture have long been prohibited by American law and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.

Our forefathers prohibited "cruel and unusual punishment" because that was how tyrants and despots ruled in the 1700s. They wanted an America that was better than that. Torture is illegal, immoral, dangerous and counterproductive. And yet, the president is using fear to trump the law.

Last January, Panetta wrote this for the Washington Monthly:

We cannot simply suspend [American ideals of human rights] in the name of national security. Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don’t. There is no middle ground.

We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that.

These are not the words of a politician; Panetta's opposition to torture is rooted in his Catholic faith.

Moreover, Panetta is a budget hawk and tried to trim CIA spending when he ran OMB. I don't see why he would tolerate the CIA wasting billions bribing corrupt officials around the world, led by Iraq and Pakistan. The CIA would accomplish much more if it slimmed down to a core focus on collecting good intelligence. For starters, Panetta should rehire Valerie Plame to stop the spread of WMD's.

Update 1: Digby finds Panetta less persuasive on warrantless wiretapping because he favored a compromise:

The same rationale is used to justify eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant. The president has made clear that the failure of the Congress to pass this authority could jeopardize our security. Instead of trying to negotiate a compromise with Congress that would meet both our intelligence and privacy concerns, it is easier to threaten with fear.

But as Digby notes, the CIA director is not in charge of overseas wiretapping, which is handled by the NSA.

Update 2: David Corn notes Panetta's foreign policy realism:

As a member of the Iraq Study Group, Panetta joined with other Establishment poohbahs to criticize George W. Bush's prosecution of the Iraq war. And in a newspaper op-ed, he noted that the Iraq war "could give al-Qaeda a base for terrorism throughout this critical region."

Corn concludes,

A CIA director who has denounced torture, advocated intelligence cuts, and backed greater congressional control of covert operations--that would be....different.

Update 3: Oops! No one told DiFi, who will replace JRock as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Back in the day, she and Panetta were fellow moderates, so they should have no problem working together.

When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under the Law is a Joke

dlindorff — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 11:09:59 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

Last week, a US federal district judge, Henry Kennedy, ruled in
favor of a case brought by the survivors of the crew of the USS Pueblo,
a spy ship captured by the North Korean Navy in 1968, who were held
prisoner by North Korea for 11 months, and who were reportedly tortured
in captivity. The judge awarded the men $65 million in damages from the
state of North Korea.

Now I’m happy for the plaintiffs. Torture is flatly banned under
international law, and nobody should be tortured under any conditions
(whatever Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia may think). But let’s
not ignore the irony of this ruling. In general, the federal courts
have been incredibly reluctant about making such rulings against the US
government for doing the same thing that North Korea did, or even worse.

Take the case of Canadian Maher Arar, a telecommunications engineer
of Syrian birth who was nabbed by US intelligence officers in an
airport transit hall at New York’s Kennedy International Airport in
2002 while returning home from a vacation in Tunisia. Arar was held
without a lawyer, interrogated, and then renditioned on a CIA plane to
Syria, where he was handed over to Syrian secret police to be tortured
and interrogated and kept in a basement cell for 11 months. The
brutalized Arar was later released when it was established that he had
no connections to terrorism.

But while Canadian authorities have apologized to Arar, US courts
have so far refused to even allow him to sue the US over his captivity
and torture, accepting the US government’s claim of “national security.”

The contradictions between the handling of these two cases are
striking. In the Pueblo instance, the ship was engaged in spying
activity at a time that the US and North Korea were technically still
at war. The US claims that the crew should not have been captured
because the vessel was allegedly in international waters, though that
actually would be no defense. After all, during wartime, it is common
for navies to sink enemy ships anywhere they find them. (North Korea
insists the ship was inside its territorial waters at the time of
capture.)

Meanwhile, Arar was grabbed by American authorities while
technically outside the US, as he was simply changing planes at Kennedy
and had remained in the international plane changing zone of the
terminal, outside the passport check.

Furthermore, there is no dispute that the Pueblo crew was involved
in military activity at the time of their ship's capture. They were
gathering intelligence on a nation against which the US was at war.
That, of course, does not justify their torture, but it makes their
capture much more legitimate than what happened to Arar.

Arar, after all, was not even arrested. Nor was he involved in any
military or intelligence or even criminal activity. He was simply
kidnapped by American intelligence operatives. He was then renditioned
to a third country, which is itself a crime under international law, to
be tortured, which compounds the felony. And yet he has thus far been
denied the right even to sue the US government for damages. Even if we
were to hand the US government all the benefit of the doubt, and
concede that they might have been acting on false information
suggesting that Arar was an active terrorist, that would still not
justify what they did to him. He should have at least had some kind of
a hearing in US custody, and then, if found to be a likely terrorist,
should have been either held in US custody or deported to his home
country of Canada. He should never, under any circumstances, have been
handed over to the security agency of a third country known to torture
its captives.

And yet Arar is not allowed to sue for the criminal torment he was
put through, while the Pueblo crew is awarded $65 million. (His case is
currently being reconsidered by the full bench of the New York Federal
Court of Appeals, which heard arguments on Dec. 9.)

Nor is he alone. While US courts have agreed that the hundreds of
captives held at Guantanamo Bay and in military brigs in the US in the
so-called “war” on terror have a right to bring their cases before a
federal court, for the most part those courts have shown extreme
deference to the Justice Department and have been upholding the right
of the US government to detain people indefinitely without charge. Even
though it is admitted that many or even most of these captives have
been subjected to torture at the hands of their American captors, they
have not been able to sue for damages. As late as last fall, one
unnamed Guantanamo detainee who sued to require his captors to provide
him with a mattress and a blanket had his case tossed out by a federal
judge, Thomas Hogan, who, astonishingly, ruled that “while the Supreme
Court’s decision in Boumediene gives Petitioner the right to
challenge the fact of his confinement…it says nothing of his right to
challenge the conditions of his confinement.”

Read that again please. A federal judge says he has the full
authority to consider whether a terrorism detainee is being properly
held—which clearly infers that at least some of the hundreds of
detainees in US custody may be improperly held—but he is not allowed to
rule on the conditions of their detention? This would be like saying a
state court has the right to rule on whether a foster child has been
properly assigned to a foster family, but no right to rule on how that
child is being cared for!

A foundation principle of American justice is supposed to be “equal
justice under the law.” Yet here we have a federal judge awarding $65
million to the crew of the spy ship Pueblo, in large part because of
allegations regarding the conditions of their confinement as POWs in
North Korea, while other judges in the same court system have ruled
that a man falsely captured and sent off to be tortured by a foreign
dictatorship’s secret service has no right to even bring his case and
that another cannot has no right to sue to get a mattress to sleep on
or a blanket to keep himself warm!

The promise of equal treatment under the law is honored in the
breach in many ways in courtrooms across America every day, of course,
but in the case of terrorism and POW issues, there isn’t even an
attempt to pretend American courts are fair.
_________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at "www.thiscantbehappening.net

White House Lied About Iraqi Yellowcake Buy, But That’s Not the Biggest Scandal

dlindorff — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:32:55 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have
long known: that the White House and in particular then White House
Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them
the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to
make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.

What is astonishing about this report,
which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush
and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the
American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it
documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate
media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable
justification for launching a war.

Set aside for the moment the fact that the claim that Saddam
Hussein had tried to buy uranium ore (so-called yellowcake) from the
desert nation of Niger was based upon forged documents which were
almost certainly the work of Defense Department hacks in the
Rumsfeld/Cheney-created Office of Special Plans (see my book The Case for Impeachment).
Even if this fraudulent deal had been real, how on earth could it have
been used as it was by President Bush and Vice President Cheney to
justify an invasion of Iraq?

Consider that what was being asserted was that Iraq had attempted
(not even succeeded!) to buy 400 tons of uranium ore. This claim was
used by President Bush, in his Jan. 20, 2003 State of the Union
address, to argue that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But in the case of a country that does not have a nuclear weapon, a program is years away, perhaps a decade or more away, from the reality of having a usable weapon.

As we have seen in the case of Iran, which has been refining
uranium ore now for at least five years, the mere fact of possessing
uranium ore, and even of having a quantity of gas centrifuges to refine
out the minute quantities of the fissionable isotope U-235 are only the
first and, technologically speaking, the easiest, steps towards
actually constructing a bomb. (Experts say that after all this time,
even if it is actually trying to build a nuclear bomb, which the
Iranian government denies, the country remains years from that alleged
goal.)

If Bush and Cheney had not been lying through their teeth, and
Saddam had actually been buying yellowcake for the purpose of making a
nuke weapon, he would still have had to obtain large numbers of
centrifuges, would have had to power them up and run them for years,
and would have then had to obtain the technology to build and test a
bomb, none of which steps he was even alleged to have taken.

Yet Bush was claiming that there was an imminent threat to
America posed by Saddam Hussein’s yellowcake purchase effort, and that
an invasion had to be launched almost immediately. He used the term
imminent because that is the legal requirement in the UN Charter, to
which the US is a signatory and which is based upon the Nuremberg
Charter established at the end of the Second World War. It states that
no nation may invade another nation unless that nation poses an
imminent threat to the would-be invader.

The yellowcake story, now definitively shown to have been a
deliberate lie, even if true, could not have constituted such an
imminent threat.

Yet not once has this key point been addressed by any member of
Congress who voted to authorize an invasion. Nor does the point get
mentioned in mainstream journalistic reports on the matter.

Average Americans, nearly half of whom reportedly believe that the
earth was formed just 6000 years ago and a fair proportion of whom
believe that the sun revolves around the earth, might be excused for
not understanding this point, but clearly intelligent members of
Congress like former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry
and future secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who both claim they
might not have voted for war “had they had known then what they know
now,” are themselves caught in a lie.

They and other war backers clearly knew in 2002 and 2003 that the
yellowcake story, even if true, was no justification for war. So did
editors and reporters (like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of the New
York Times, for example).

I have yet to see a single US corporate media outlet explain that
the yellowcake story was simply never a justification for war. It will
probably never happen, and yet many analysts have said it was that
claim by Bush, Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and
others (remember her dark warnings about not wanting a “smoking gun” to
be a “mushroom cloud”?), more than any other that stampeded the nation
into a war that has cost over $1 trillion over five years, and over
4000 US lives and one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld and others in the outgoing
administration should all be impeached, tried and jailed for their
lying and treason in embroiling the US in the pointless and criminal
Iraq War, with the yellowcake story a key element in any indictments.
But there needs to be some kind of reckoning too, for the willful
ignorance and deceit on the part of the majority of Congress and of the
press in pretending that an alleged scheme to buy uranium ore was a
justification for launching a war of aggression, which five years on,
is still continuing.

The American people themselves also need to reflect deeply, not
just on how ill served we are by our elected officials and by our
media, but on how gullible we have become, and how ignorant.
__________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008 and
now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/38360';
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digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\nA new congressional report is belatedly confirming what many have long known: that the White House and in particular then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, lied to Congress in 2004 when he told them the Bush administration was not repeatedly warned by the CIA not to make the claim that Saddam had tried to buy uranium ore from Niger.\r\n\r\n What is astonishing about this report, which documents that the CIA at least four times tried to prevent Bush and other top officials from presenting that lie to Congress and the American public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, is not that it documents what has long been known, but that Congress and the corporate media are still pretending that the claim itself was an acceptable justification for launching a war.";
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Prosecuting Bush and Cheney for Torture: No One Can Be Above the Law

dlindorff — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 11:02:07 -0500

By Dave Lindorff

A month before he takes office, it has become the conventional
wisdom in our conventional media that Barack “No Drama” Obama will not
seek or even allow any prosecution of Bush administration officials for
crimes committed over the past eight years—not even for authorizing and
promoting the illegal use of torture on captives of America’s wars on
Iraq, Afghanistan and “terror.”

Take that pillar of conventional thinking, the New York Times.
A lengthy December 18 editorial laid out a solid case that approval for
torture had come from top Bush/Cheney administration officials, and
then concluded that “A prosecutor should be appointed to consider
criminal charges against top officials in the Pentagon and others
involved in planning the abuse.” But then the paper’s editors went on
after that to give Obama a pass, saying, “Given his other problems—and
how far he has moved from the powerful stands he took on these issues
early in the campaign—we do not hold out real hope Barack Obama, as
president, will take such a politically fraught step.” In the view of Times’
conventional-thinking editors, it would appear that the American
government cannot be expected to prosecute criminals and fight a
recession at the same time.

There is no mention of the obvious point that if crimes have been
committed—and in the case of the authorizing of torture, which is
banned by both international treaties to which the US is a signatory,
and by US law, which folded the torture bans into the US Criminal Code
for good measure, they clearly have been—-the president and his
incoming attorney general have a sworn obligation to prosecute them.
That’s what “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” means,
after all.

A “politically fraught” step? That should apply to not prosecuting criminals, should it not?

Note here that for the Times, and for the rest of the
conventional thinkers who have reduced corporate journalism to such
thin gruel that no one bothers with it any more, “politically fraught”
refers exclusively to the idea that the Right will supposedly be riled
up at any effort to prosecute war criminals in the outgoing
administration. If people on the Left, or even the center, large
numbers of whom believe strongly that the current administration should
be held accountable for its crimes, get upset because there is no
effort to prosecute them, that doesn’t count as “politically fraught.”

A new torture report, just released by the current, only narrowly
Democratic, Senate Armed Services Committee, has definitively laid the
blame for the sickening campaign of torture of captives by American
military personnel and CIA agents, on officials all the way up to
former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chief of Staff Richard
Myers, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington,
White House legal counsel (and later attorney general) Alberto
Gonzales, and others. It really traces the approval directly up to
President Bush, noting that it was Bush’s signing of an executive order
on February 7 2002, exempting captives in the so-called (and loosely
defined) “War” on Terror from protections of the Geneva Conventions,
which authorized the military’s and CIA’s descent into rampant, brutal
lawlessness.

Others, myself included (in my book The Case for Impeachment,
co-authored with Stanford University law professor Barbara Olshansky,
and published in 2006 by St. Martin’s Press), have long argued that
both President Bush and Vice President Cheney are guilty of war crimes,
especially for their authorization, condoning, encouraging, protecting,
and failure to halt and to punish the practice of torture by American
forces under their control. But here we have a bi-partisan committee of
Congress finally, belatedly, making the same case. How can the new
incoming president and commander in chief not order a criminal investigation of all of those responsible
for crimes that not only were grievous violations of US and
international law, but that, by the admission of key American military
leaders, led to practices at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib which
were “the first and second identifiable causes of US combat deaths in
Iraq.”

On its face, I would submit that if as president Obama blocks
prosecution of Bush/Cheney administration war criminals, it will be the
wounded American soldiers and their relatives, and the relatives of
Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan at the hands of fighters in
those countries who were recruited into battle by the images of the
torture and abuse who will make his decision “politically fraught.”
(And let’s not forget that failure to prosecute torture violations is
itself a war crime—making Obama himself potentially culpable should he
fail to act.)

I have spent the last two and a half years actively promoting the
idea that President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be impeached
for their crimes against the Constitution, their manifest abuses of
power, and their actual statutory crimes, such as torture and lying to
Congress. Thanks to the political cowardice of the Democratic majority
in the House of Representatives, under the craven leadership of House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the gutlessness of House Judiciary Chairman
John Conyers, the impeachment that was so richly deserved did not
happen. But my failed quest for impeachment does not mean that calls
for criminal indictment for crimes committed should be equally quixotic.

It’s one thing for a bunch of politicians in Congress to decide that
impeachment would be “too divisive,” or to decide that they “don’t have
the votes” to win an impeachment vote in the House or conviction in the
Senate, and therefore to oppose even trying to make the case (I
disagree with that argument completely, and note that it could as
easily have been made in 1973 or early 1974 with respect to Richard
Nixon, in which case he never would have faced an impeachment hearing
in the House or been run out of office for his crimes). But it’s
another thing entirely to argue, as the conventional media drones are
arguing, and as President-Elect Obama has been saying, that there can be no
prosecution of people in the Bush/Cheney administration for crimes
committed during their two terms of office.

What kind of message is this sending to the world, and to the
citizens of the United States? If you commit a crime and you are
important enough, it’s not prosecutable in America?

This is taking the “too big to fail” argument that is being used to
justify the bailout of failed enterprises like AIG, Citicorp, JP
Morgan/Chase, and soon GMC and Chrysler, and turning it into “too big
to prosecute” in the case of politicians.

“No one is above the law” used to be a proud motto of the US legal
system. Now we are about to have our first president who is a constitutional
scholar, and he appears ready, with the backing of the conventional
media, to change that motto to: “No one is above the law, except for
presidents, vice presidents and their top staffs.”

The right answer, of course, is simple. The new president and the
Congress should appoint a special prosecutor and authorize him or her
to determine if there have been crimes committed by the prior
administration, and then, if such crimes are found to have occurred, to
prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Once such a prosecutor
is appointed, the White House and Congress should step aside and let
justice take its course.

As for the media, they should stop giving the new president a pass. Instead of, like the Times,
saying they “do not hold out real hope” of such a step being taken,
they should, in editorials, be demanding that it be taken. Meanwhile,
in their news pages, they should be hard at work digging out the
evidence of those crimes, and of the damage done by them.

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Is It Time to Abolish the CIA?

Bob Fertik — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:37:09 -0400

After the CIA's miserable failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, then-Senator Pat Moynihan proposed eliminating the CIA and putting the State Department back in charge of collecting intelligence, as it was before World War II.

Now, after the intelligence community's catastrophic failure on Iraq, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is proposing an idea that's nearly as radical: intelligence analysts should talk to bloggers like Juan Cole:

In a new directive that challenges the insular culture of U.S. intelligence agencies, Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell has ordered analysts to cultivate relationships with outside experts “whenever possible” in order to improve the quality of intelligence analysis.

The DNI’s July 16 directive on “Analytic Outreach” (pdf) establishes procedures for implementing such outreach, including incentives and rewards for successful performance.

“Analytic outreach is the open, overt, and deliberate act of an IC [intelligence community] analyst engaging with an individual outside the IC to explore ideas and alternate perspectives, gain new insights, generate new knowledge, or obtain new information,” the directive states.

“Elements of the IC should use outside experts whenever possible to contribute to, critique, and challenge internal products and analysis….”

“Sound intelligence analysis requires that analysts… develop trusted relationships” with “experts in academia; think tanks; industry; non-governmental organizations; the scientific world; …and elsewhere.”

There are a number of reasons why Juan Cole and other bloggers regularly get things right, while the CIA and other intelligence agencies get things wrong.

For one, Cole speaks Arabic and Farsi and reads local news sources, while the U.S. government (U.S.G.) has very few Arabic/Farsi speakers, because so many were purged for being gay or exposing neocon lies.

Of equal importance, Cole isn't part of the U.S.G. bureaucracy and therefore isn't subject to the carrots (like Medals of Freedom for intelligence whores like George Tenet) and sticks (like intimidating visits from Dick Cheney) that result in corrupted intelligence.

Finally, Cole isn't getting paid so he doesn't have to make s**t up to get a check - unlike people like Ahmed Chalabi and Curveball and the bounty-hunters who delivered 90% of the Gitmo prisoners.

But given the obvious advantages of non-corrupt intelligence over corrupt intelligence, isn't it time to revive Pat Moynihan's proposal to eliminate the CIA entirely, and hand intelligence back to the State Department?

Imagine how much better U.S. intelligence would be if it was compiled through a partnership of honest civil servants and honest citizens, both inside the U.S. and abroad - and imagine how much cheaper too.

And to take this thought one step further, imagine how much better U.S. intelligence would be if it was all made open source and crowdsourced? For example, if everyone who cared about the possible threat from Iraq in 2002-2003 had access to all of the information (such as Gen. Hussein Kamel's 1995 CIA debriefing that he had destroyed all Iraqi WMD's after the 1991 Gulf War), it would have been impossible for George Bush to lie the country into invading Iraq.

US Backed Terrorist Group Explode Car Bomb In Iran Killing 11 Iranian Soldiers, 31 Wounded

Chris Elliott — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:30:31 -0500

A War On Terrorism or a War Of Terrorism?

Reports as usual vary wildly and small wonder that some news sources are trying to pin this on yet another subsidiary of "Al Qaeda". But this wasn't a suicide attack.

The terrorists drove a car, packed with explosives, up to a bus carrying soldiers of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Some reports say that they forced the bus to stop by firing on it with automatic weapons, others that they blocked the road with the car while pretending to have broken down. Either way, they quickly escaped on motorbikes before detonating the car bomb by remote control.

Reports claim so far 11 soldiers killed and up to 31 wounded. A terrorist attack on this scale against Iran's elite forces, in broad daylight is unprecedented.

The official Iranian news agency announced that five arrests have been made including the ring leader and a major investigation has been launched to determine who else is involved in the attack.

It also claims to have evidence that the terrorist group was backed by the United States.

Explosion kills 11 members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards

Iranian News Agency

A car bomb killed 11 members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards on Wednesday in the deadliest attack in years near the Pakistani border, and Iran accused the United States of backing militants to destabilize the country.

A Sunni Muslim militant group called Jundallah, or God's Brigade, which has been blamed for past attacks on Iranian troops, claimed responsibility for the bombing. The blast represented a sharp flare-up of violence in the remote southeast corner of Iran, near Pakistan and Afghanistan, that has long been plagued by lawlessness.

The area is a key crossing point for opium from Afghanistan and often sees clashes between police and drug gangs. At the same time, Jundallah has waged a low-level insurgency in the area, led by Abdulmalak Rigi, a member of Iran's ethnic Baluchi minority, a community that is Sunni Muslim and is present in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Rigi has said his group is fighting for the rights of impoverished Sunnis under Iran's Shiite government.

An al-Qaida-linked group of the same name has carried out attacks in Pakistan, but Pakistani officials say it is not connected to the Iranian militants. Iranian officials blamed "insurgents" and "terrorists" for Wednesday's bombing -- and accused the United States of backing them to sow instability in Iran.

The London Times

February 15, 2007

The official Iranian news agency quoted an unnamed official as saying evidence suggested that the bus attackers had support from the United States.

Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie, Iran's Intelligence Minister, claimed last week that Tehran had identified 100 spies working for the United States and Israel in the border areas.

The attack follows sporadic violence in Iran's oil-rich south-western province of Khuzestan, which has a minority Arab population, and borders southern Iraq, where British troops are based.

Explosions killed more than 20 people in Khuzestan's capital, Ahvaz, in 2005 and early 2006. London has denied as "ludicrous" Iranian accusations that Britain has fomented instability in Khuzestan.

BBC News

Correspondents say an attack of this size and nature is unprecedented in Iran - hitting an elite force in daylight in an open street. Reports say suspects behind the bombing have been arrested.

The city of Zahedan lies in the province of Sistan-Baluchestan, which borders both Afghanistan and Pakistan. It has been hit by a string of attacks and kidnappings blamed on the hardline Sunni group called Jundallah.

Iranian officials have accused Britain and the United States of supporting ethnic minority rebels operating in the Islamic republic's sensitive border areas.

Tehran Times

Five suspects have been arrested, an official of the Sistan-Baluchestan Governor General’s Office announced.

“The detained individuals entered the province from another country and according to their confessions, they committed the terrorist act based on a plan to incite division between Shias and Sunnis and provoke ethnic strife,” Soltan-Ali Mir told the Mehr News Agency.

The ringleader of the bombing is among the five, he added. “Some of the arrested terrorists entered Iran two days ago,” Mir stated.

Sunni ulema in Sistan-Baluchestan Province have condemned the bombing, he added. A major operation is underway to identify and arrest all the others involved in the act.

International Media In Overdrive At Prospect Of War With Iran

Chris Elliott — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:07:28 -0500

First I invite you to watch this excellent 10 minute speech by George Galloway to the British Parliament on January 27, 2007 in which he delivers a stark warning that Britain is sleepwalking into a catastrophic war with Iran along with the US and Israel. George Galloway was the man who you may remember lambasting the US Senate over false accusations of oil bribes with Saddam.

George Galloway's speech to the British Parliament, January 2007

Now, if that very sobering speech has got your attention, the following should also be noted.

In the last few days international media have gone into war overdrive, in exactly the same way they did prior to the Iraq invasion in 2003. I was going to write that later this week the Bush Administration will make public it has evidence that Iran is involved in the Iraq insurgency and attacks on US troops, but in fact this is already being touted by CNN.

I include here a sample of the hundreds of international media reports pointing towards a war with Iran, thought to take place in the next few weeks. I have highlighted some significant sentences in the reports.

It should also be noted that Iran has a defensive alliance with Syria and close economic and to some extent military ties to Russia, China and other SCO members (see my blog on Chinese anti-satellite weapons for more on this relationship). Venezuala has also pledged to support Iran in the event of war with the US.

Iran involvement suspected in Karbala compound attack
POSTED: 9:50 p.m. EST, January 30, 2007
NEW: U.S. probing possible Iranian involvement in brazen compound raid

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The Pentagon is investigating whether a recent attack on a military compound in Karbala was carried out by Iranians or Iranian-trained operatives, two officials from separate U.S. government agencies said.

"People are looking at it seriously," one of the officials said.

That official added the Iranian connection was a leading theory in the investigation into the January 20 attack that killed five soldiers.

The second official said: "We believe it's possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained."

Five U.S. soldiers were killed in the sophisticated attack by men wearing U.S.-style uniforms, according to U.S. military reports.

Both officials stressed the Iranian-involvement theory is a preliminary view, and there is no final conclusion. They agreed this possibility is being looked at because of the sophistication of the attack and the level of coordination.

Bush 'spoiling for a fight' with Iran

Simon Tisdall
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian

US officials in Baghdad and Washington are expected to unveil a secret intelligence "dossier" this week detailing evidence of Iran's alleged complicity in attacks on American troops in Iraq. The move, uncomfortably echoing Downing Street's dossier debacle in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, is one more sign that the Bush administration is building a case for war.

Nicholas Burns, the senior US diplomat in charge of Iran policy, says Washington "is not looking for a fight" with Tehran. The official line is that Washington has made a conscious decision to "push back" against Iran on a range of fronts where the two countries' interests clash. Primarily that means Tehran's perceived meddling in Iraq, where its influence with the Shia-led government and Shia majority population appears to be increasing as Washington's weakens.

State department spokesman Sean McCormack claimed this week the administration has a body of evidence implicating Iran in sectarian attacks against Iraq's Sunni minority. "There is a high degree of confidence in the information that we already have and we are constantly accumulating more," he told the New York Times.

CIA and Pentagon officials are also touting intelligence that "Iranians are smuggling into Iraq sophisticated explosive devices, mortars, and detailed plans to wipe out Sunni Arab neighbourhoods," the paper said. Officials would make a "comprehensive case" this week. But President George Bush has already acted on information received. He confirmed yesterday that he has ordered US forces in effect to kill or capture Iranian "agents" targeting Americans in Iraq - as happened earlier this month when five Iranian officials were detained in Irbil.

Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2007 11:00 a.m. EST
Sen. Robert Byrd: Bush Wants War with Iran

Top Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd is warning that the Bush administration is preparing to go to war with Iran.

In a e-mail message sent to activist Democrats, the West Virginia lawmaker – who is now President pro tempore of the Senate and third in line for the presidency after Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi – rails against President Bush’s plans for a troop surge in Iraq and declares:

"Not only does Mr. Bush intend to plunge us deeper into what is now clearly a civil war in Iraq, but he is now increasing his belligerence towards Iran and Syria. In his State of the Union address, Mr. Bush called out Iran no less than seven times.

"I fear that what we are seeing now is an administration intent on laying the groundwork for a wider war in the Middle East.

Europeans fear US attack on Iran as nuclear row intensifies
Ian Traynor in Brussels and Jonathan Steele
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian

"There's anxiety everywhere you turn," said a diplomat familiar with the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "The Europeans are very concerned the shit could hit the fan."

A US navy battle group of seven vessels was steaming towards the Gulf yesterday from the Red Sea, part of a deployment of 50 US ships, including two aircraft carriers, expected in the area in weeks.

"No path is envisaged by the EU other than the UN path," the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, told the Guardian yesterday. "The priority for all of us is that Iran complies with UN security council resolutions."

The IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, called at the weekend for a "timeout" in the worsening confrontation in an attempt to enable both sides to save face and climb down. But the Americans rejected the proposal and European officials involved in the dispute also believe the Iranians cannot be trusted to stick to a deal.

Russia queries US military build-up
Published: Sunday, 28 January, 2007, 08:18 AM Doha Time

MOSCOW: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday said he would demand an explanation from the US over its military build-up in the Middle East and criticised Washington for “hardline” policies against Iran.

Lavrov said he would discuss Moscow’s concerns during a meeting of the international Quartet group, which meets in Washington next week to try to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

“I have not seen any change in the rather aggressive rhetoric from Washington. It continues, as does the growing military presence in the region. This will be one of the questions that we want to clear up in Washington,” he was quoted as saying by state-run news agency RIA Novosti.

Lavrov also criticised what he said were US threats to bypass the UN in taking new measures against Iran’s controversial nuclear power programme.

Washington believes the programme, in which Russia is building the first civilian power station at Bushehr, secretly aims to build an atomic weapon.

“Washington’s hardline policy concerning Iran foresees... much tougher sanctions than those called for in the last UN Security Council resolution,” he was quoted as saying by Itar-Tass. “We would like to get an explanation on what stands behinds this.”

Iran’s strategic proposal to Russia

Tehran Times Political Desk
TEHRAN -- The Islamic Republic of Iran welcomes the development of ties with Russia in all areas and believes that there is great potential for their expansion, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said here on Sunday.

“The two countries can be two complementary partners in the political, economic, regional and international arenas,” Ayatollah Khamenei told Russian Security Council chief Igor Ivanov on Sunday.

The Leader said that both Iran and Russia would benefit from enhanced ties.

He also thanked Russian President Vladimir Putin for sending him a written message, which was delivered by Ivanov. Pointing to the fact that Iran and Russia control about half of the world’s gas reserves, the Leader proposed that “the two countries can jointly establish an organization like OPEC for dealing with gas cooperation.”

Iran and Russia can block Washington’s hegemonistic plans

U.S. Freezes Sales of F-14 Fighter Parts

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

The Pentagon has frozen the sale of all spare parts for F-14 “Tomcat” fighters because of concerns about their transfer to Iran, a Defense Department spokeswoman said Jan. 30.
The sales of all F-14 parts were suspended on January 26 pending a review, the Defense Logistics Agency said in a statement.

Dawn Dearden, a spokewoman for the agency, told AFP the sales were frozen “given the current situation in Iran.”
Iran bought 79 F-14s from the United States before the fall of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
The move comes amid growing U.S.-Iranian tensions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program and what Washington sees as Iranian subversion of U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq.

US must abandon Iraqi cities or face nightmare scenario, say experts

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 30 January 2007

The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.

This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush's last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country - but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.

Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report's authors, "would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised." But it was the "least bad option" open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.

US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was "the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be", as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.

The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq's "spill-over" potential across the Persian Gulf region.

'US poised to attack,' claims Bulgarian agency
Tuesday, January 30, 2007

ISTANBUL - Turkish Daily News

The United States “could be using its two air force bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania's Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April," the Bulgarian news agency Novinite claimed. Commenting on the report, The Sunday Herald wrote that the U.S. build-up along the Black Sea, coupled with the recent positioning of two U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups off the Straits of Hormuz “appears to indicate that U.S. President Bush has run out of patience with Tehran's nuclear misrepresentation and non-compliance with the U.N. Security Council's resolution.”

“Whether the Bulgarian news report is a tactical feint or a strategic event is hard to gauge at this stage. But, in conjunction with the beefing up of the America's Italian bases and the acquisition of anti-missile defense bases in the Czech Republic and Poland, the Balkan developments seem to indicate a new phase in Bush's global war on terror,” wrote the Scottish paper.

The Bulgarian agency named Colonel Sam Gardiner, "a U.S. secret service officer stationed in Bulgaria," as the source its story.

Before the end of March, 3,000 U.S. military personnel are scheduled to arrive "on a rotating basis" at the United States' Bulgarian bases. Under the U.S.-Bulgarian military cooperation accord, signed in April, 2006, an airbase at Bezmer, a second airfield at Graf Ignitievo and a shooting range at Novo Selo were leased to the U.S. Army.

Resource Wars
by William K. Tabb

Ted Koppel, writing in the New York Times (February 24, 2006), responded to what he described as the Bush administration’s “touchiness” about the charge that we are in Iraq because of oil by stating the obvious, though often unsaid, truth, “Now that’s curious. Keeping oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz has been bedrock American foreign policy for more than half a century.” Today control over the world’s oil supply is at the forefront of Washington policy makers’ thinking, even if the president and his team deny any such intent and talk publically of reducing dependence on Middle East oil by three-quarters of present levels, an absurdly impossible goal. Two-thirds of the oil in the world is in the Middle East, much of it under Iraq and Iran, the axis of oil, the current targets of the U.S. war on terrorism. Control of oil is integral to Washington’s official goal of world domination, a goal stated this baldly in national security documents.

During the administration of the first President Bush, the Pentagon under then defense secretary Dick Cheney produced a strategy paper stating the mission of “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.” The United States would defend their interests for them and so the policy was to “discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.”6 Control of the world is facilitated through control of essential resources. By controlling the world’s energy, and in the presence of its overwhelming military superiority, the United States is potentially able to deny the lifeblood of any society and intimidate and coerce the world more effectively, a design going back easily to Henry Kissinger, and earlier to the emergence of U.S. global power at the end of the Second World War, but now carried to new heights by the neoconservatives.

Hegemony has always been a bipartisan consensus. With regard specifically to the Middle East we have the Carter Doctrine: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Since Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force with this intervention in mind the United States has moved to forward positioning, the establishment of a huge permanent military presence in the region, including a number of multi-billion dollar bases in Iraq, huge fortified cities with all the comforts of home, fast food places, video stores, and car rental agencies for the soldiers who garrison the empire along “the arc of instability.” All of this takes place in territories which coincide with the parts of the Global South where oil is found. That the official rationale is now the war on terrorism in place of anticommunism is secondary to the continuation of the basic policy of world domination.

Chinese Test Anti-Satellite Weapon And Americans Should Take Note

Chris Elliott — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 04:53:28 -0500

China’s unannounced test of an anti-satellite ballistic missile on the 11 January 2007 has evidently caused significant concern in the West and in particular the US. Not only does it put existing military and civilian satellite networks at risk, the act was clearly intended as a warning in the true cold war sense.

As I write this report, the story has finally hit the mainstream media but in most cases only a fairly sanitized version of the events is being made public. This very newsworthy event was not made public for 6 days after the launch, but despite the delay in publication, some interesting details are emerging that indicate increasing tensions between China and the US.

Chinese Test Anti-Satellite Weapon

By Craig Covault/Aviation Week & Space Technology 01/17/2007 07:45:59 PM

U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile.

The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, NASA and other government organizations have a full court press underway to obtain data on the alleged test, Aviation Week & Space Technology will report in its Jan. 22 issue. If the test is verified it will signify a major new Chinese military capability.

Neither the Office of the U. S. Secretary of Defense nor Air Force Space Command would comment on the attack, which followed by several months the alleged illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser.

“Illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser” is a significant omission in most accounts. Clearly China can now track US spy satellites with laser guided precision and has now demonstrated the ability to destroy them.

On January 19th, Al Jazeera also carried the story with this interesting addition.

Debris threat

A senior White House official, requesting anonymity, said that Britain, Japan and South Korea were expected to express their concerns to China soon.

A key concern of the test is that debris could interfere with civilian and military satellite operations on which the West increasingly relies.

On the day of the test, a US defense official said the United States was unable to communicate with an experimental spy satellite launched last year by the Pentagon's National Reconnaissance Office.

However, there was no immediate indication that this was a result of the Chinese test.

By itself, China’s development of this technology would not be of such concern. The US and Russia have possessed equivalent systems for decades. But set against the backdrop of cooling Sino-US relations and open threats of war with Iran (who has observer membership status within the SCO) it looks increasingly like a shot across America’s bow.

The fact that the launch was not announced beforehand and would certainly be detected by the US suggests this was indeed meant to cause “concern”. It wasn’t meant to be secret and the timing may also be significant.

Just two days before the missile launch the Associated Press published this report concerning US displeasure at multi-billion Euro $ gas deals signed between Iran and China.

U.S. cautions China over reported multibillion dollar gas deal with Iran

The Associated Press Published: January 9, 2007

BEIJING: The United States has urged China to reconsider a reported multibillion dollar (euro) natural gas deal with Iran amid international efforts to sanction Tehran for its nuclear programs, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said Tuesday.

China's No. 3 oil company, China National Offshore Oil Corp., was reported last month to be in talks to develop Iran's Northern Pars gas field.

Around the same time, the U.N. Security Council unanimously agreed to impose sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend a uranium enrichment program that is suspected of being part of a nuclear weapons project.

Given the sanctions and Tehran's continued defiance, "We think this is a particularly bad time to be initiating major new commercial deals with Iran," U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Susan Stevenson said in an e-mail.

Less than a week after this warning to China, we read in the London Times

Britain is joining an American military campaign to blunt Iranian influence in Iraq and the Gulf.

In a move likely to heighten tension in an already volatile part of the world, US forces have been ordered to detain Iranian agents in Iraq and to strengthen substantially America’s military presence in the Gulf.

Two Royal Navy minehunters have arrived in the Gulf to reinforce a naval frigate on patrol in the area.

continues

Britain’s contribution is two minehunters HMS Blyth and HMS Ramsey, which will remain in the Gulf for an unusually-long two-year mission to keep shipping routes open in the event that Iran attempts to block oil exports.

The presence of 2 US carrier strike groups in the Gulf is not only provocative to Iran.

It must surely also be a pressure on China to show solidarity with it’s fellow SCO member and essential energy provider, or risk dissatisfaction with the other member states. [on edit this is misleading - Iran has applied for membership but has not yet become a member, but it's close status as a business partner makes this likely in the near future.] The SCO is after all an alliance of convenience to counter the strength of US and NATO military influence in the whole region. Iraq never had such powerful friends but Iran not only has good relations, it has long term energy contracts essential for China’s growing industry. The fact these contracts are remunerated in Euro $’s can only inflame the situation further.

It should also be noted that the nuclear power plant that is the casus belli for the US campaign against Iran is the result of a very lucrative contract with Russia; the deaths of Russian engineers and nuclear scientists in a strike against these facilities, not to mention the radioactive contamination throughout that region would also put a great deal of pressure on Vladimir Putin, the other leading statesman in the SCO.

Another point to consider is the West’s reliance on the GPS satellite network for civilian and military aircraft navigation and even the guidance systems for long range missiles. Even if there are back-up satellite systems for military use these would likewise be very vulnerable to attack. A sudden and overwhelming attack on these satellite systems, in a defensive capacity in the face of a perceived threat of war, would render a good deal of the West’s aircraft grounded and prevent early warning systems from detecting long range ballistic missile launches.

Collectively, the SCO controls a large portion of the world’s population and strategic resources and the Bush administration’s determination to provoke it is extremely dangerous for us all. [On edit China's launch of this missile is also highly provocative but perhaps less so than the huge build up of armed forces in the Gulf region. The consequences of a military confrontation between the SCO and NATO across the war torn regions of the Middle East are profound to say the very least].

[edited to correct html and clarify some assumptions]

Update January 21st, 2007

It seems there is more to the “Illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser” statement than first appears. It isn't as I assumed a laser targetting system for tracking satellites.

The London Telegraph published this report back in September 2006 and it seems likely that this "Illumination" is the result of a laser weapon powerful enough to blind a spy satellites optical sensors.

Beijing secretly fires lasers to disable US satellites
By Francis Harris in Washington
Last Updated: 1:55am BST 27/09/2006

China has secretly fired powerful laser weapons designed to disable American spy satellites by "blinding" their sensitive surveillance devices, it was reported yesterday.

The hitherto unreported attacks have been kept secret by the Bush administration for fear that it would damage attempts to co-opt China in diplomatic offensives against North Korea and Iran.

Sources told the military affairs publication Defense News that there had been a fierce internal battle within Washington over whether to make the attacks public. In the end, the Pentagon's annual assessment of the growing Chinese military build-up barely mentioned the threat.

Update January 22nd, 2007

The Chinese government have announced that the launch of the anti-satellite missile was intended to force the United States to the negotiating table and reconsider a ban of the use of weapons in Space.

On January 20th the London Times reports

Washington’s response will be crucial in determining what happens next: an arms race in space or an agreement to limit the use of Star Wars technology. American analysts said that the test had exposed the “soft underbelly” of America’s national security apparatus, because most of the Pentagon’s spy satellites orbit at a similar height to the weather satellite destroyed by the Chinese test.

White House critics said that the Chinese test was a result of President Bush’s aggressive unilateralism, this time in his space policy. Last year the US expressly ignored Chinese and Russian calls for a global ban on the development of space weapons. Instead, a new policy preserved America’s right to develop military space technology, while “dissuading” others.

However, China's warning appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Before most of the public were even aware of the launch, the Bush administration have dismissed calls to alter their controversial space weapons policy.

China’s Anti-Satellite Test Widely Criticized, U.S. Says No New Treaties Needed

By Jeremy Singer and Colin Clark
Space News Staff Writers
posted: 19 January 2007
6:20 p.m. ET

Standing by the new space policy the White House issued last year, a U.S. State Department official said China’s Jan. 11 test of an anti-satellite weapon in space is not cause to open negotiations on a new treaty that would place limits on what countries can do in space.

“We do not think there is an arms race in space. The United States believes that the existing body of existing international agreements — including the Outer Space Treaty, as well as the liability and respective compensation conventions — provide the appropriate legal regime for space,” the State Department official said in a Jan. 19 telephone interview.

The official said the space policy clearly states that the United States will oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to, or use of, space and that no change in that policy is warranted.

“Arms control is not a viable solution for space. For example, there is no agreement on how to define space weapon. Without a definition you are left with loopholes and meaningless limitations that endanger national security. No arms control is better than bad arms control,” the State Department official said.

A new development is likely to inflame Sino/US relations further. Yesterday the Chinese premier announced he had authorised the diversification of up to 1/3 of their foreign exchange reserves now mostly locked up in US Treasury bonds.

The Financial Times reports

China’s multibillion dollar question
By Richard McGregor in Beijing

Published: January 21 2007 20:04 | Last updated: January 21 2007 20:04

With a vaguely worded statement from Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, at the close of a weekend meeting in Beijing on finance policy, the die has been cast for a momentous change in the management of the country’s massive foreign exchange reserves.

Mr Wen said the management of the reserves, the world’s largest at more than a thousand billion dollars, should be improved and the channels through which they are invested diversified.

continues

Mr Wen did not endorse any specific plan but has indicated the government will consider proposals on how to use some of the money – now mostly locked up in US Treasury bonds – more aggressively.

Initial projections for the amount of money that could be more actively managed are $200bn-$300bn but Mr Wen shed no light on this.