osama bin laden Posts

Reports are in that link up the US torture program and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Jonathan S Landay in McClatchy News quotes a "former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue":

"The main [reason for the torture] is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."

"There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued.

All this is not really a surprise; I covered it in real time over on Nonviolence.org. There were numerous reports that the Vice President and Secretary of Defense were pushing the intelligence agencies to come up with evidence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is supposed to be the champion of freedom but we resorted to the most brutal of communist-era torture techniques because our highest officials were more interested in their cartoon view of the world than the complex reality (and not so complex: anyone who's taken an "Intro to Islam" class would know that an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ideological theories don't match up, it's time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

The bullets and bombs have finally found their mark. It is no surprise to learn of yet another assasination attempt against Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto. Details are still sketchy and conflicting but the only thing we really need to know is that this attempt was successful and that Bhutto is dead less than two weeks before Parliamentary elections that might well have brought her into power for the third time.

Pakistan is a country who's top government scientist exported atomic bomb-making across the world for decades. It still hosts Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan's Taliban are still more-or-less headquartered in its Western provinces. The standoff with India has spawned war after war over the decade, now nuclear-enabled should either country get so emboldened. Billions of dollars of United States money has left Washington for Islamabad since 9/11 and a popular politician can't even campaign there without deadly assassination attempts. Pakistan is one of the world's hot spots, a nexus of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, religious extremism. It is a very sad day today indeed.

It seems that every day brings new revelations from mainstream media about governmental spying on Americans.

MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pentagon had a database of protesters including the Raging Grannies and a dozen or so Quakers in Florida. This must have prompted the New York Times to publish a story they had been sitting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret National Security Agency to start evesdropping on Americans following the 9/11 terror attacks. It's revelation was an FBI agent's email complaining about radical militant librarians [who] kick us around. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Department of Homeland Security was hard at work monitoring the Massachusett's inter-library loan system [UPDATE: this has been revealed to be a hoax by the student]. Trying to outdo the DHS in ridiculous, we learned on the 20th that the FBI has been infiltrating vegan potlucks. Today it turns out the New York City Police Department has been doing its own extensive investigations into protesters. They even apparently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite violence (their contribution to the self-parody has been to send officers undercover on bicycle protests).

Are we surprised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of paranoia in the ranks of spydom. Nonviolence.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Service when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill President Bush (well, actually we're pretty certain it was a acne-faced fourteen year old procrastinating on his geometry homework). When I shot shot photos of a scuffle at a Biodemocracy protest a few months ago a Philadelphia police detective was in my office an hour later wanting to see it (the "melee" was harmless except for a policeman with heart conditions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some monitoring and prudence is indeed necessary, what ties together the string of stories this week is the randomness of the targets. It's as if the agencies had lost all sense of judgement. Anyone critical of the war (or even mainstream culture: witness the vegans) was considered a threat. All leads were investigated, no matter how silly.

While invading American's privacy is upsetting and unwarranted, the greatest danger is the sheer mass of irrelevant information that's been collected. What's an agency to do with reams of data on bicycle riders and Quakers? Who's watching the flight schools and fertilizer depots while Agent Nincompoop is trading hummus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?

We now know that while Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein didn't conspire together, they did have one thing in common: their power was funded by our dependence on their oil. But even as Saddam's show trial begins, televisions are watching America's new national security enemies: Katrina and Wilma. Al Qaida's 9/11 attacks and the Saddam Hussein's dictatorship were "powered by" oil industry fortunes and short-sighted global energy policies, the same policies now bringing us global warming and monster storms.

Before making landfall in Mexico's Yucatan and pounding Florida, Hurricane Wilma was declared the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in history. That we got to a W-name itself is cause for concern: the first tropical storm of the year gets a name starting with "A" and so forth through the alphabet. This summer has been the most active hurricane season since record-keeping started 150 years ago. We've seen so many storms that weather officials have now run through the alphabet: meteorologists are now having to track Tropical Storm (now Depression) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, five devastating hurricanes ripped across Florida, each one coming so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year later. As I write, Wilma is pounding Western Florida, one of the fast-growing regions in the country. And of course Katrina devasted New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.

Global climate change is here. After decades of political hemming and hawing, only the most slimy of oil industry apologists (and Presidents) could argue that global warming hasn't arrived. We've built a national culture built on inefficient burning of fossil fuels. Developers put more and more people on unprotected sandbars built, maintained and insured by tax dollars. Someday is here and our weather is only going to be getting worse. We could be preparing for the inevitable adjustments. We could be investing in conservation, in renewable energies. We could change our tax codes to encourage sustainable housing: not just getting new development off beaches but also building urban and semi-urban communities that reduce automobile dependence.

Instead we spend billions of dollars on our oil addictions. We're now waiting for the announcement of the 2,000th U.S. military casualty in iraq. Administration officials used Katrina to rollback environmental protection regulations in Louisiana. The arctic ice cap is rapidly melting away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil industry officials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there.

How many Katrina bin Laden's and Saddam Wilma's does it take before we get the news.

While the images of U.S. soliders torturing iraqi prisoners at Al Grahib Prison in Badgdad have been broadcast around the world, US officials have frequently reassured us that conditions at the U.S. detention camp in Guantamano Bay, Cuba, were acceptable and in accord with the Geneva Convention's rules for treatment of prisoners. As proof the Pentagon and Bush Administration have frequently cited the fact that the International Red Cross regularly inspects prison conditions at Guantamano. They forgot to tell us what they've seen.

A confidential report prepared by the International Red Cross this summer found that conditions at Guantamano Bay were "tantamount to torture." Strong words from a cautious international body. Because of the way the IRC works, its reports are not made available to the public but instead presented to the accused government, in the hope that they will correct their practices. In predicable fashion, the Bush Adminstration privately denied any wrongdoing and kept the IRC findings secret. In a display of incredible audacity it then defended itself from other accusations of torture by citing the IRC's presence at Guantanamo, conveniently omitting the IRC's strongly-worded criticisms. Amazing really.

The IRC report is still secret. We only know of it second-hand, from a memo obtained by the Times that quotes from some of its findings ("Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo"http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html, Nov 29). What kind of stuff is going on there? The Times recently interviewed British prisoners who had been detained in Afghanistan and iraq and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Here's one story:

One one regular procedure was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels.

It's not needles under fingernails or electrodes to the privates, but it is indeed "tantamount to torture." While it was hard to believe these prisoners' stories when they were first published a few months ago, they become much more credible in light of the IRC conclusions.

We still don't know about what's happening in the camp. The Bush Administration has the power, not to mention the duty, to immediately release International Red Cross reports. But the United States has chosen to suppress the report. No torturing government has ever admitted to its actions. Saddam Hussein himself denied wrongdoing when he ran the Al Grahib prison and used it for torture. We rely on bodies like the International Red Cross to keep us honest.

There are those who defend torture by appealing to our fears, many of which are indeed grounded in reality. We're at war, the enemy insurgents are playing dirty, Osama bin Laden broke any sort of international conventions when he sent airliners into the World Trade Center. Very true. But the United States has a mission. I believe in the idealistic notion that we should be a beacon to the world. We should always strive for the moral high ground and invite the world community to join us. We haven't been doing that lately. Yes it's easier to follow the lead of someone like Saddam Hussein and just torture anyone we suspect of plotting against us. But do we really want him as our role model?

Today the United States military began an extensive campaign against the iraqi city of Falluja, which has been under the control of anti-American forces. We can no longer claim that we are fighting outside trouble-makers from Osama bin Laden. Nor can we claim that our armies are fighting to free iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. No, now we are attacking iraqi forces who simply don't want to live under an American occupation. I don't sympathize with those who would use violence to drive out American forces but I can certainly understand why they want their own country back--and back now, without U.S imposed limitation on future constitutions.

In Afghanistan and iraq we've seen that winning battles has been easy but winning the peace elusive. The new military campaign in Falluja hints of yet more battlefields to come. Perhaps if President Bush had served in Vietnam he would have learned some lessons from that war, but unfortunately permanent war has become our governing policy now as it was then. We have just sunk a few more inches into the quagmire.

The New York Times reports today that U.S. military forces have conceded that rebels control large portions of iraq. Fighting rages in parts of Baghdad while the U.S. has largely pulled out of the cities in the "Sunni Triangle." Ramadi, Falluja, Baquba and Samarra are rebel strongholds where loyalty to Saddam Hussein remains high. Meanwhile, escalated violence has led to more U.S. deaths. By the time you read this, the 1000th American will have been killed in this second Persian Gulf war.

Even by the yardstick of military strategy, these facts question whether the U.S. is losing the war in iraq. The country is looking more like Afghanistan, where warlords (many ex-Taliban) run most of the country. The president of Afghanistan is more like a mayor, his control is largely limited to the capital city. Osama bin Laden remains free almost three years after 9/11. The hope that the U.S. might win the hearts of the Afghan people is long forgotten. Will this be the situation in iraq two years from now.

Cynics contact us regularly with long emails about how nonviolence isn't a practical political stategy because it just doesn't work. But are these wars working? Is the world any safer from terrorism than it was a few years ago?