Racial Slur Moment of the Weekend

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The ever-racist Pat Buchanan outdid himself last night debating Rachel Maddow on affirmative action, Sonia Sotomayor and why we don't need no brown-skinned people here, thanks. To Maddow pointing out that 108 of 110 Supreme Court judges have been white:

"White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg...This (is) a country built basically by white folks."

- Common Dreams

Where Did Those Traders in Toxic Assets Go?

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(Tomgram) Forward:

I woke up one morning late last week to the news that taxpayers, already $149 billion in the hole in the Treasury Department's TARP bailout program, are set to lose even more. As rescued banks now try to extricate themselves from the government's control, they must buy back stock warrants proffered at the time of the bailout, which, as the New York Times described it, offer "the right to purchase shares in each of the companies at roughly the price of their shares at the time of the deals."

As it happens, thanks largely to that taxpayer-funded bailout, bank stocks have risen since last fall's meltdown. Selling those warrants, then, should mean a tidy profit for taxpayers. But no such luck, it seems. Almost a dozen small banks have already bought back their warrants, and for a considerable discount -- a mere 66% of their value -- costing taxpayers upwards of $10 million. If this were to continue when giant firms like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley come up to bat, taxpayers could be out up to $2.1 billion. Think of that as a small potential thank-you note from the banking business to Americans for helping it out of a jam.

Right behind that bit of sprightly news was a report from the Associated Press that the giant insurance firm AIG, almost 80% owned by taxpayers, was now back in consultation with the Obama administration over just how much more it should pay out in further retention bonuses -- this after multi-millions in such bonuses were already paid -- including "about $235 million for employees at AIG's financial products unit." AIG's near collapse, added the AP, "was not due to its traditional insurance operations, but instead risky derivatives contracts written by the financial products division." In addition to those traders, for 40 top execs of the dismally failed company, there is to be a payout of a mere $9 million in further bonuses for 2008. What a comedown!

Of course, who can be surprised by this sort of thing these days? Not, I assume, Barbara Garson, known in the Vietnam era as the author of the satiric play "MacBird," who has since gone on to write books on American work life (All the Livelong Day) and on a single bank deposit as it made its dizzying way around our planet (Money Makes the World Go Around). For TomDispatch, she's written a little mystery story about those financial-products types, what's happened to them, and -- most strikingly -- their possible rebirth. Think of her as this site's equivalent of Miss Marple, set loose on our financially melted-down planet. - TomDispatch

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The Mystery of the Missing Unemployed Man

Barbara Garson
July 12, 2009 - TomDispatch

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For the book I'm writing about unemployed Americans, I had no trouble finding accountants, brokers, cashiers, or die casters. Admittedly, I had to go out of town to interview the die casters. But when I arrived, alphabetically, at unemployed editors, I had only to look in my address book.

Financiers were further from my life experience than either die casters or editors. Yet the "do you know anyone who…?" method still proved an effective way of turning up unemployed hedge-fund analysts and bank loan officers -- and within a week at that. It was only when I refined my search to ferret out unemployed financiers who had actually handled those infamous "toxic assets" that I hit the proverbial brick wall.

Since mortgage-backed securities and the swaps that insure them had been the downfall of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and the giant insurance company AIG, packs of bankers who worked on them must, I assumed, be roaming free on the streets of Manhattan. Yet I couldn't find a single one.

Finally, I phoned a law firm representing Lehman Brothers employees in a suit for the pay they were owed when the company shut down without notice. I asked the lawyer if he could possibly inquire among his unemployed clients for someone, anyone, who used to work with mortgage-backed securities and might be willing to talk about how he or she was getting by today. "I don't have to use real names," I assured him. Many of the unemployed people I'd already interviewed felt so lost and ashamed that I had decided not to use their real names. Unemployed bankers deserve anonymity, too.

But the lawyer made it clear that that wasn't the problem. "Most of them were snapped up immediately by Barclays," he said. He represents other financial plaintiffs as well, and he seemed to think that the kind of person I was looking for hadn't remained unemployed very long.

The Clues

How could that be? We've heard ad nauseum about mortgage-backed securities. They're bonds "structured" out of thousands, or tens of thousands, of home or commercial mortgages. The bond's owner was to receive interest out of the mortgage payments from all those property owners. He could earn a low 5% interest if he opted to be paid out of the first money that came in. (Institutional investors often chose that safe "tranche," or slice, of the security.) But back when mortgages seemed so safe, a hedge-fund gambler might have been happy to opt for the last mortgage payments to come in -- in exchange for heftier 7% to 8% interest rates. Of course, that was the gamble. Too many missed mortgage payments meant little or no returns for his fund.

When last I heard, more than half of U.S. mortgages were held this way, so it was a reasonable supposition that a lot of people had been employed structuring, trading, and insuring those bonds. But who in his right mind would touch this stuff now? While that lawyer sounded like an honest, helpful fellow, I still wondered whether he wasn't just brushing me off to protect his embarrassingly unemployed clients.

Soon after, however, I met a bank corporate loan officer who confirmed that his colleagues on the "structured side" were indeed still employed. In fact, he thought he noticed a couple of new chairs at their trading desk in the bank's trading room. "Those damn things" had become so complicated, he speculated, that the people who put them together were now needed in similar numbers to "unwind the bank's positions" -- that is, get them out of the deals.

That must be it, I thought, and recalled a moment soon after AIG got the last of its $182 billion bailout from the government. At that time, the company braved a massive public outcry to award big bonuses to its top employees, including those who had created the "swaps" (short for credit default swaps, or CDSs) that swamped the company. Like so many other companies, AIG claimed that bonuses were necessary to retain the "best brains," especially those who understood the credit-default swaps.

These swaps are a type of derivative that was supposed to represent a way of insuring the very bonds we've been talking about. Here's how it worked -- at least theoretically, at least before the ship went down: On a given bond, say number 123456, an insurance company like AIG would essentially say to a large investor, perhaps a mutual fund, "You pay us $7,000 a month and, if you fail to receive the interest on that bond for, say, two months, then we'll buy the whole bond from you for the $200 million you paid for it." In other words, it was a private, custom-written contract to simply "swap" one of those bonds for money under certain agreed circumstances.

These deals were couched in such terms, rather than as straight insurance policies, because insurance is regulated and the regulations require setting aside relatively small amounts of money in reserve in case the disasters insured against occur. But swaps aren't regulated. Nothing need be set aside.

Here's the remarkable thing: both the Bush and Obama administrations decided that the government would make good on these non-regulated, non-insurance policies. The costs could be humongous.

Now, here's an even more distressing complication. You didn't have to own the original bond to buy the swap that was really an insurance policy. An "investor" could approach AIG and say, "You know that Merrill asset-backed bond -- number 123456? I'll pay you $7,000 a month, too, and if the bond defaults, then you owe me 200 million also."

It's as if any number of people could buy (or, really, bet on) your life insurance policy. Or think of a race track where anyone can go to the window and bet on any horse in any race -- and collect if it comes in. (Or in this case, collect if mortgage payments didn't come in.)

If our government were merely going to cover the original mortgage-backed securities, the maximum payouts, though large, would at least be calculable. If 50% of the mortgages in the U.S. were, as they say, securitized, and if they all were to default, that would be a vast but finite loss. But since any number of people could buy into the swaps on those bonds, the swap payouts could be an unknown amount that would be many times the value of the real buildings. How many multiples of reality might that come to? Two times, 10 times, 100 times? Who knows? Remember, these are unregulated transactions.

And keep in mind that the "investment" being bailed out here has nothing to do with anything in the real world. Neither party to these "me too" swaps owned, built, or financed the original housing, or anything else for that matter. They were simply betting on whether a certain group of people would pay their mortgage bills.

Why our government would underwrite these bets, and why such gambling contracts are legal in the first place, is beyond me, but as we know, they were placed on a vast scale. No wonder, I thought, that my swap men were all still employed. After all, even if there's no work for die-casters or editors, there's still all that "unwinding" to do by the people who did the winding in the first place.

The Crime

Then I read this headline in the Financial Times: "Strange but true -- the credit specs are back." According to the column that followed by John Dizard, "[T]hanks to the Geithner Treasury's policy of reform, rather than dissolution, CDS trading has regained a vampiric strength that the real economy still lacks."

So, now I understood: the man I couldn't find, the man who wasn't unemployed, wasn't just doing that final bit of unwinding or cleaning up old messes. He was busy making new ones!

How could Dizard be certain, though, that the debt trade is really booming again? He cites "one friend of mine in the credit fund trade" who has "made money on both the downside and the upside during the past year."

Of course, who can know for sure? If there was a derivative exchange along the lines of the New York Stock Exchange, we'd have a good idea of the volume of the trade. But derivatives -- I know you've heard this more than once -- are unregulated.

President Obama's recent white paper on financial reform suggests that derivatives should, in fact, be regulated, except for what it refers to as "custom" products. That, unfortunately, sounds like just the right-sized loophole for the financial instruments I've described. And -- I'm sure you won't be surprised by this -- financiers are lobbying furiously to expand that hole.

The Motive

Why is there such an interest in reviving the debt market and why are financiers so determined to keep it unregulated? Aren't they scared of it, too? Let me quote Dizard one last time:

"After all, if the dictates of style and tax auditors say you have to go easy on conspicuous consumption, and if there's no demand for the products of real capital spending, then you might as well take your cash to the track, or the corner credit default swap dealer."

In other words, people are speculating on derivatives and derivatives of derivatives because there's no action in the real world. You can't invest in new real businesses or lend money to old real businesses for expansion unless people can afford to buy the products they'll produce. That brings me back to where I started: our real world. You know, the one where just about everyone's unemployed except those swap guys.

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Barbara Garson is the author of two classic books about work: All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work and The Electronic Sweatshop. Her latest book, Money Makes the World Go Around, published in 2000, described the hollowed-out global economy that was heading for a crash. Now, she's embarked on a book about the current Great Recession.

Everything That Happens in Afghanistan Is Based on Lies or Illusions

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Forward -

Writing on the phenomenon of escalation, journalist Norman Solomon begins a recent piece this way: "The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now. That's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually." Then he adds: "[N]o amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren't already far along at the Pentagon."

Well, be astonished no longer. Right now, unsurprisingly enough, it's not looking good in that country. Roadside bomb (IED) attacks are spiking (with an "all-time high" of 465 in May alone), and American and NATO deaths have jumped by 40% since 2008, 75% since 2007. And so, despite a major Obama administration expansion of the war and a significant commitment of new troops and money, fast on the heels of Solomon's piece came the first trial balloon -- the first leaks in a Washington Post piece from those unnamed, if ubiquitous, "senior military officials" -- for what may be the next round of escalation.

In an ongoing assessment of the devolving situation in Afghanistan, due to be delivered to the White House next month, the new U.S. commander General Stanley A. McChrystal has supposedly already concluded "that the Afghan security forces will have to be far larger than currently planned if President Obama's strategy for winning the war is to succeed." Here's the catch (and you knew there would be one, didn't you?): the only way to make that force larger is to pour billions more dollars and thousands of new American soldiers into the country as "advisors" and "trainers." As if he had read Solomon, National Security Adviser James Jones was already talking about those ceilings. ("It would not surprise me if the ceiling for the Afghan army request was raised...")

So it goes. Too bad no one's escalating the diplomacy, as the regularly on-target columnist for the British Guardian, Simon Jenkins, pointed out recently: "Diplomacy, your hour has come. There is no way soldiers will find an exit from Afghanistan. They can deliver defeat or they can deliver bloody stalemate. They cannot deliver victory and every observer knows it. This conflict will end only when the courage being daily demanded of soldiers is also shown by politicians."

From Kabul, TomDispatch regular Ann Jones reports on a changing situation in her normal vivid fashion, offering in the process a unique movie review from the front lines of filmmaking. - TomDispatch

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A Film That Captures Some Edgy, Fearful Truths

Ann Jones
July 16, 2009 - TomDispatch.com

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[Note: Fixer will first be shown on HBO on Monday night, August 17th. It will be re-aired on August 20th, 23rd, 25th, 29th, and 31st. Check your local listings for the exact times.]

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KABUL, Afghanistan, July 2009 -- I've come back to the Afghan capital again, after an absence of two years, to find it ruined in a new way. Not by bombs this time, but by security.

The heart of the city is now hidden behind piles of Hescos -- giant, grey sandbags produced somewhere in Great Britain. They're stacked against the walls of government buildings, U.N. agencies, embassies, NGO offices, and army camps (of which there are a lot) -- and they only seem to grow and multiply. A friend called just the other day from a U.N. building, distressed that the view from her office window was vanishing behind yet another row of Hescos. Urban life as Kabulis knew it in this once graceful city has been lost to the security needs of strangers.

The creation of Hescostan in the middle of Kabul is both an effect of, and a cause of, war: an effect because it seems to arise in response to devious enemy tactics that are still relatively new to Afghanistan, such as the use of roadside bombs (IEDs) and suicide bombers (though there has actually been no attack in Kabul for six months now); a cause because it is so clearly a projection, an externalization of the fears of men out of their depth. It is a paradox of such "force protection" that the more you have, the more you feel you need. What's called security generates fear. Now comes a documentary that projects that fear onto the screen.

It is 2006, late in the year. A reporter stands on a rocky hillside near the city of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan and points a wobbly camera at dark-clad gunmen ranged at a distance before him. They've wrapped the tails of their turbans to mask their faces. They carry their Kalashnikovs at the ready. The reporter shouts a question: "Does the Taliban receive support from Pakistan?"

As the camera jumps about to find the Talib who is speaking, a translator voices his answer: "Yes, Pakistan stands with us. On the other side of the border, we have our offices there. Some people in Pakistan is supporting us and the government of Pakistan does not say anything to us. They provide us with everything."

The reporter -- Christian Parenti of the Nation magazine -- has his story. For years, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has charged Pakistan with backing the Taliban, while Pakistan's then-President Musharraf denied it, and officials of the Bush administration looked the other way. Now, Parenti has the word of armed Taliban. This is the kind of story a foreign correspondent can't get without a fixer; that is, a local guy who knows the language, the local politics, the protocols of custom -- and how to arrange a meeting like this in the middle of nowhere with men who might kill you.

A Talib warns of an approaching reconnaissance plane. "We should go," the scared reporter says. The camera spins wildly across a vast empty expanse of rock and pale sky. "We should go." Moments later, safely back in a car speeding away, Parenti turns the camera on his own grinning face: "This is the most relieved American reporter in Afghanistan," he says, and describes the man sitting beside him -- Ajmal Nashqbandi, a 24-year-old Pashtun from Kabul -- as "the best fixer in Afghanistan." But we already know what Parenti doesn't (because filmmaker Ian Olds has told us up front before the titles even hit the screen): soon the fixer will be dead, murdered by the Taliban. We will be witnesses.

If this sounds harrowing, it is. Fixer is the best documentary I've seen on Afghanistan -- so good it's hard to imagine a better one. It's all jagged edges, blurs, and disconnects, catching as it does both the forbidding emptiness of the land and the edginess of war-weary Afghans. One long segment, apparently showing the inside of Parenti's shawl as he conceals a camera from potentially hostile villagers, seems the visual correlative of the feeling that unsettles all outsiders from time to time in this country: the sense of being completely in the dark. In 2006-2007, as the Taliban surged back with kidnappings, murders, bombs, and jihadi suicide attacks, this is how Afghanistan felt. It's the feeling that still drives Hesco sales in the capital.

Full disclosure: both Parenti and I have written about Afghanistan for the Nation for several years. I write mostly about women, Parenti mostly about the war, and I admire his work. We met for the first time only a couple of months ago, after both of us were invited to take part in a conference on Afghanistan. He told me about Fixer, then playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. I went to see it, and when it ended I could hardly get out of my seat. Watching it again on DVD in Kabul made me weep.

By refusing to exploit Ajmal's murder for the sake of suspense -- by revealing it at the start -- Olds has chosen to make a film full of the kind of fear that seems to inhabit international centers of power in Afghanistan today. The film's nervous visual style is strikingly different from the clean-cut look of Occupation: Dreamland, his earlier documentary about American soldiers in Iraq. Critics will surely have much more to say about Fixer's importance as a film. It has already won a raft of prizes, including firsts at Documenta Madrid and the Pesaro (Italy) Film Festival, and Olds took home a Tribeca award this year as the best new documentary filmmaker.

How Lies Begat Illusions Begat Lies

What I want to focus on, though, is the way the film resonates with conditions in Afghanistan today. Olds has the good sense to insert a quick history lesson in this film, on the grounds that you can't understand the Taliban without knowing about America's covert operations in the region in the 1980s. Back then, President Ronald Reagan's administration, mainly through the CIA, used the Pakistani Intelligence services to fund, arm, and train Afghan and foreign Islamist jihadis to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan subsequently used "channels built with U.S. money" to install in Afghanistan a friendly government -- the Taliban.

Later, after the George W. Bush administration invaded the country and the U.S. ousted the Taliban, it installed Hamid Karzai as president and returned many of the old Islamist jihadis to power in his government. Thus, this peculiar, well-established fact underlies the current war in Afghanistan: the United States sponsored both sides.

Some analysts say the U.S. "invented" all the "enemies" involved; others, that the U.S. (and Saudi Arabia) merely paid the bills, while Pakistan directed the action to its own advantage. Either way, this history -- much of it still secret or repeatedly re-spun -- leaves all parties to the current conflict in an intellectual sweat. They must plan for the future on the basis of a past they can't acknowledge. With national elections set for August 20th, the United States is planning for an Afghan future that still includes the jihadi buddies its officials know they should long ago have left behind.

Only the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has called, year after year, for a moral accounting. Its surveys of Afghan citizens consistently find that the people want lasting peace, and to attain it, they would prefer some sort of truth and reconciliation procedure, like the one that took place in South Africa, to cleanse the country and set it on an honest intellectual and moral footing.

For obvious reasons, the United States wants no part of the truth that would emerge from such a process. Just this week, the Obama administration first claimed it had no grounds to investigate General Abdul Rashid Dostum's infamous 2001 massacre of Taliban prisoners, even though Dostum seems to have been on the CIA payroll at the time, and his troops were backed by U.S. military operatives. Later, the president reversed course, ordering national security officials to "look into" the matter. In the end, President Obama may prefer to "move on." As does Dostum, who recently rejoined the Karzai administration.

I've elaborated here on Olds's quick history lesson to more fully explain why you may be finding it hard these days to understand how we got into what's already being called "Obama's War" -- and how to get out. Think of it this way: everything that happens in Afghanistan is based on (1) a lie, (2) an illusion, or (3) both. Then throw in mass illusion as well, carefully constructed so that each person tells others only what they want to hear.

Which brings us back to Fixer, a film steeped in stories of duplicity and self-delusion that are the personal and political currency of Afghanistan today. In one telling incident, Parenti pushes to observe the famously corrupt Afghan judiciary in action. He's rewarded with a front row seat at a murder trial, only to learn that it has been staged for his edification.

In fact, a court official admits, the production Parenti witnessed didn't depict the way the court really works, but the way "it should work" according to international standards. The judiciary knows those international standards very well, since NGOs and private contractors supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and other aid agencies have offered them training, and what's called "capacity building," for years. The trainers report success, which of course is what the aid agencies want to hear; and the trainees may be encouraged (as in this case) to perform for the public. If Parenti had played the part assigned to him in this exercise in mass illusion, he'd have reported a glowing story about the success of Afghanistan's new rule of law. (He didn't.)

Afghans have an expression -- "pesh pa been" -- referring to people who move relentlessly ahead by watching their own feet. Parenti, at least, could see when he was being tripped up. But the incident leaves you wondering: if officials of the Karzai government go this far for a single American reporter, what extravagant performances have they mounted all along for junketing Senators and cabinet members, and the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Laura Bush, not to mention the recent rounds of Obama era visitors?

Even Ajmal the fixer repeatedly misjudges situations and his own people; and in the end, he proves to have been more of an innocent than Parenti. In an eerie moment captured on screen, Parenti predicts that one day the Taliban will kidnap a Western journalist. No way, says Ajmal, assuming that he and his clients are protected by Pashtunwali, his (and the Taliban's) tribal code of honor. Later, working for the Italian journalist Daniele Mastrogiacomo, Ajmal fixes a fatal appointment with Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah. Taken hostage, Ajmal reassures his family in a Taliban video: "These are Muslims. We are in the hands of Islam."

Behind the Hescos Where History Is Being Re-Spun

Illusion and duplicity entrap the fixer, too, and spin his personal story into a political event. The Italians, who notoriously negotiate with hostage takers, persuade Karzai to exchange five Taliban prisoners for Mastrogiacomo and Ajmal. In the excitement of being freed, however, Mastrogiacomo fails to keep track of his fixer. The Taliban see an opportunity to recapture Ajmal and demand the release of two more prisoners. Karzai and his foreign minister, having freed the foreigner, then scramble to the moral high ground, refusing to negotiate with terrorists. Orders come down from Pakistan to kill Ajmal -- on April 8, 2007 -- to make Karzai look bad in the eyes of his own people. Mullah Dadullah sends a video of the beheading.

Ajmal's stricken father asks, "What kind of government doesn't protect its own citizens?" The answer is: a government that's bought, paid for, and answerable to outsiders, a government that has neither the need nor the inclination to care for its citizens. As Karzai explains the matter, "The Italians built us a road."

That's the government the international community is now spending more than $500 million to reelect. (Most of that money comes from the U.S.) International election officials, of course, are neutral -- so neutral that they look the other way as Karzai makes deals with rival warlords to ensure his reelection. One by one they come over to his side, and word leaks out about which ministries they've been promised.

International agencies responsible for mounting the election have already abandoned the goal of a "free and fair" vote. They're aiming for "credible," which is to say, an election that looks pretty good, even if it's not. In the context of accumulated illusions, this goal is called "realistic," and perhaps it is. As the fixer's grieving father says, "Our government is a puppet of foreigners. That is why we expect nothing from it."

As I write, 4,000 newly arrived U.S. Marines are trudging through the blistering heat of Helmand Province to push back the Taliban so local Pashtuns can turn out to vote next month for Karzai, their fellow Pashtun. What's wrong with this new Obama strategy? For one thing, in some areas the local Pashtun population has instead turned out to fight against the foreign invaders, side by side with the Taliban (who, it should be remembered, are mostly local Pashtuns). They're as fed up as anybody with the puppet Karzai. Like millions of other Afghans, they say Karzai has done nothing for the people. But saddled with history, Karzai remains the horse the U.S. rode in on.

Let me make it clear that Olds and Parenti don't draw these comparisons to current affairs in Afghanistan. Fixer is simply and appropriately subtitled The Taking of Ajmal Nashqbandi. It's a tribute to a trusted colleague. But watch the film yourself and you'll be immersed in duplicity: officials manipulate the truth, citizens fear to tell it, Americans can't bear to look it in the face. Watch the film and maybe you'll understand how hard it has become, here behind the Hescos where history is being re-spun, to size anything up, pin anything down, recognize an enemy, or help a friend.

[Note: Fixer will first be shown on HBO on Monday night, August 17th. It will be re-aired on August 20th, 23rd, 25th, 29th, and 31st. Check your local listings for the exact times.]

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Ann Jones wrote at length about the failure of American aid in Kabul in Winter a book about American meddling in Afghanistan as well as her experience as a humanitarian aid worker there from 2002 to 2006. For a concise report on many of the defects in international aid mentioned here, check out Real Aid (pdf file below), a report issued in 2005 by the South African NGO Action Aid.

http://www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/69_1_real_aid.pdf

TOON

Were Thousands Of Afghans Murdered As U.S. Troops Stood By?

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James Risen
July 10, 2009 - The New York Times

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See documentary here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8763367484184611493

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After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.

American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.

"At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either," said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. "The first reaction of everybody there was, 'Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.' "

It is not clear how — or if — the Obama administration will address the issue. But in recent weeks, State Department officials have quietly tried to thwart General Dostum's reappointment as military chief of staff to the president, according to several senior officials, and suggested that the administration might not be hostile to an inquiry.

The question of culpability for the prisoner deaths — which may have been the most significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 2001 American-led invasion — has taken on new urgency since the general, an important ally of Mr. Karzai, was reinstated to his government post last month. He had been suspended last year and living in exile in Turkey after he was accused of threatening a political rival at gunpoint.

"If you bring Dostum back, it will impact the progress of democracy and the trust people have in the government," Mr. Prosper said. Arguing that the Obama administration should investigate the 2001 killings, he added, "There is always a time and place for justice."

While President Obama has deepened the United States' commitment to Afghanistan, sending 21,000 more American troops there to combat the growing Taliban insurgency, his administration has also tried to distance itself from Mr. Karzai, whose government is deeply unpopular and widely viewed as corrupt.

A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general's role, said an official briefed on the matter. Asked about looking into the prisoner deaths, the official said, "We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated."

The Back Story

While the deaths have been previously reported, the back story of the frustrated efforts to investigate them has not been fully told. The killings occurred in late November 2001, just days after the American-led invasion forced the ouster of the Taliban government in Kabul. Thousands of Taliban fighters surrendered to General Dostum's forces, which were part of the American-backed Northern Alliance, in the city of Kunduz. They were then transported to a prison run by the general's forces near the town of Shibarghan.

Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.

A recently declassified 2002 State Department intelligence report states that one source, whose identity is redacted, concluded that about 1,500 Taliban prisoners died. Estimates from other witnesses or human rights groups range from several hundred to several thousand. The report also says that several Afghan witnesses were later tortured or killed.

In Afghanistan, rival warlords have had a history of eliminating enemy troops by suffocating them in sealed containers. General Dostum, however, has said previously that any such deaths of the Taliban prisoners were unintentional. He has said that only 200 prisoners died and blamed combat wounds and disease for most of the fatalities. The general could not be reached for comment, and a spokesman declined to comment for this article.

While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed, and human rights groups are concerned that evidence has been destroyed. In 2008, a medical forensics team working with the United Nations discovered excavations that suggested the mass grave had been moved. Satellite photos obtained by The Times show that the site was disturbed even earlier, in 2006.

"Our repeated efforts to protect witnesses, secure evidence and get a full investigation have been met by the U.S. and its allies with buck-passing, delays and obstruction," said Nathaniel Raymond, a researcher for Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in Boston that discovered the mass grave site in 2002.

Seeking an Investigation

The first calls for an investigation came from his group and the International Committee of the Red Cross. A military commander in the United States-led coalition rejected a request by a Red Cross official for an inquiry in late 2001, according to the official, who, in keeping with his organization's policy, would speak only on condition of anonymity and declined to identify the commander.

A few months later, Dell Spry, the F.B.I.'s senior representative at the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been "stacked like cordwood" in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.

Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports "so they could be debunked."

But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.

"I was disappointed because I believed that, true or untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because someday it may turn out to be a problem," Mr. Spry said.

The Pentagon, however, showed little interest in the matter. In 2002, Physicians for Human Rights asked Defense Department officials to open an investigation and provide security for its forensics team to conduct a more thorough examination of the gravesite. "We met with blanket denials from the Pentagon," recalls Jennifer Leaning, a board member with the group. "They said nothing happened."

Pentagon spokesmen have said that the United States Central Command conducted an "informal inquiry," asking Special Forces personnel members who worked with General Dostum if they knew of a mass killing by his forces. When they said they did not, the inquiry went no further.

"I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.," said Marshall Billingslea, former acting assistant defense secretary for special operations, referring to the Department of Defense.

High-Level Conversation

Another former defense official, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, recalled that the prisoner deaths came up in a conversation with Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense at the time, in early 2003.

"Somebody mentioned Dostum and the story about the containers and the possibility that this was a war crime," the official said. "And Wolfowitz said we are not going to be going after him for that."

In an interview, Mr. Wolfowitz said he did not recall the conversation. However, Pentagon documents obtained by Physicians for Human Rights through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm that the issue was debated by Mr. Wolfowitz and other officials.

As evidence mounted about the deaths, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell assigned Mr. Prosper, the United States ambassador at large for war crimes, to look into them in 2002. He met with General Dostum, who denied the allegations, Mr. Prosper recalled. Meanwhile, Karzai government officials told him that they opposed any investigation.

"They made it clear that this was going to cause a problem," said Mr. Prosper, who left the Bush administration in 2005 and is now a lawyer in Los Angeles. "They would say, 'We have had decades of war crimes. Where do you start?' "

In Washington, Mr. Prosper encountered similar attitudes. In 2002, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, then the White House coordinator for Afghanistan, made it clear that he was concerned about efforts to investigate General Dostum, Mr. Prosper said. "Khalilzad never opposed an investigation," Mr. Prosper recalled. "But he definitely raised the political implications of it."

Mr. Khalilzad, who later served as the American ambassador to Afghanistan, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Prosper said that because of the resistance from American and Afghan officials, his office dropped its inquiry. The State Department mentioned the episode in its annual human rights report for 2002, but took no further action.

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See documentary here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8763367484184611493

New military robots 'could feed on corpses'

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Wonderful: your most horrible military-death-cyborg-synergy dreams come true.

John Byrne
July 15th, 2009 - Raw Story

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A Maryland company under contract with the Pentagon is developing a robot that can burn organic material and use collected debris as fuel -- including, but not limited to, things like sticks, grass, debris -- and dead bodies. Fox News reports:

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

That "biomass" and "other organically-based energy sources" wouldn't necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they'd be plentiful in a war zone.

EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone Power Technology of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an "external combustion chamber" burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity.

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.
The article notes that the Pentagon could use the EATR as the foundation for any number of battlefield vehicles, be they ambulances, transports or actual weapons-oriented machines.

Robotic Technology, Inc. provides more palatable details about their project -- which they describe as simply a foraging robot. Cadavers aren't mentioned.

We originated the concept of the EATR in 2003 and the project was sponsored as a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project by an agency of the Department of Defense..

The purpose of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR)™ (patent pending) project is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling, which would otherwise preclude the ability of the robot to perform such missions. The system obtains its energy by foraging – engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.
On the other hand, popular science blog Pharnygula, says Fox's report is only sensationalizing the story.

The military has plans for a new kind of drone robot that will wander the wastelands of future battlefields, scooping up organic debris — such as dead bodies — and burning them to fuel their advance. The call it an EATR: Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot.

It's kind of sweet, in a morbid way. It recycles! It uses renewable energy! Put a gun on it, and it could even harvest its own fuel as it mows its way through the enemy's cities!

To be perfectly fair, though, the company building it doesn't talk about using bodies for energy, but is more about generic biomass. Bodies are probably messy and inefficient compared to hunks of wood or corn stubble. It's Fox News that emphasized the corpse-eating idea, which somehow seems like just the kind of thing Fox would find copacetic.

Bush's Hit Teams

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Despite the new controversy over whether a global CIA "hit team" ever went operational, there has been public evidence for years that the Bush administration approved "rules of engagement" that permitted executions and targeted killings of suspected insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Robert Parry
July 15, 2009 - ConsortiumNews

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In effect, President George W. Bush transformed elite units of the U.S. military – including Special Forces and highly trained sniper teams – into "death squads" with a license to kill unarmed targets on suspicion that they might be a threat to American occupying forces.

In the recent public debate over whether Bush also authorized the CIA to assemble teams of assassins to roam the world hunting al-Qaeda suspects, the U.S. news media has cited the distinction between such face-to-face executions and the CIA's use of remote-controlled Predator drones firing missiles to kill groups of suspected insurgents in or near the war zones.

However, the evidence is that the Bush administration also permitted U.S. military units to engage in close-quarter executions when encountering alleged insurgents, even if they were unarmed and presented no immediate threat to American or allied troops.

This reality surfaced in 2007 with the attempted prosecutions of several U.S. soldiers whose defense attorneys cited "rules of engagement" that permitted killing suspected insurgents.

One case involved Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., who was acquitted by a U.S. military court in Baghdad on Sept. 28, 2007, in the murders of two unarmed Iraqi men – one on April 27, 2007, and the other on May 11, 2007 – because the jury accepted defense arguments that the killings were within the approved rules. (Sandoval was convicted of lesser charges relating to planting evidence on a victim to obscure the facts of the homicide.)

The Sandoval case also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon's Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to drop "bait" – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot Iraqis who picked up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007]

Afghan Execution

Another case of authorized murder of an insurgent suspect surfaced at a military court hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in mid-September 2007. Two U.S. Special Forces soldiers took part in the execution of an Afghani who was suspected of leading an insurgent group.

Though the Afghani, identified as Nawab Buntangyar, responded to questions and offered no resistance when encountered on Oct. 13, 2006, he was shot dead by Master Sgt. Troy Anderson on orders from his superior officer, Capt. Dave Staffel.

According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been operating under "rules of engagement" that empowered them to kill individuals who had been designated "enemy combatants," even if the targets were unarmed and presented no visible threat.

The troubling picture was that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up to President Bush, authorized loose "rules of engagement" that allowed targeted killings – as well as other objectionable tactics including arbitrary arrests and indefinite detentions, "enhanced interrogations" otherwise known as torture, kidnappings in third countries with "extraordinary renditions" to countries that torture, secret CIA prisons, and "reeducation camps" for younger detainees.

Typical of Washington politics, however, the loudest arguments have been over whether the Bush administration adequately notified Congress of covert aspects of these operations, including the reported CIA-assassination plan which allegedly was ordered kept hidden from the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Some Republicans have said Democrats proved that they don't have the toughness to defend U.S. national security by raising questions about the hit team, while pro-Democratic pundits note that the Bush administration apparently demonstrated its incompetence by failing to get the assassination program off the ground. In other words, the debate is centered on peripheral issues, not on the substance of extrajudicial murders.

Similarly, Attorney General Eric Holder is said to be leaning toward appointing a special prosecutor to investigate some CIA personnel for torturing detainees, but only if they went beyond the parameters of torture that had been spelled out by Bush administration lawyers. In other words, senior government officials who sanctioned limited waterboarding and other torture techniques would not be held to account, only overzealous interrogators who went even further.

A Sordid History

Like torture, assassinations and the use of other lethal force against unarmed suspects and civilians violates a variety of laws and has a notorious history in irregular warfare, both regarding cross-border murders and violent repression of an indigenous resistance in which guerrillas and their political supporters blend in with the local population.

And, at least inside and near the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's "global war on terror" appears to have recreated what was known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist backers.

Through a classified Pentagon training program known as "Project X," the lessons of Operation Phoenix from the 1960s were passed on to Third World armies, especially in Latin America, giving a green light to some of the "dirty wars" that swept the region, causing tens of thousands of political murders, widespread use of torture, and secret detentions.

Bush's alleged plan for global hit teams also has similarities to "Operation Condor" in which South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent assassins on cross-border operations to eliminate "subversives."

Despite quiet support and encouragement for Latin American "death squads" through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government presented itself as the standard-bearer for human rights and criticized American adversaries that engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush announced his "global war on terror," while continuing to impress the American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25, 2007.

Under Bush's double standards, he took the position that he could override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who would get basic human rights and who wouldn't. He saw himself as the final judge of whether people he deemed "bad guys" should live or die, or possibly face indefinite imprisonment and torture.

Yet, whatever Bush and other higher-ups approved as "rules of engagement," the practice of murdering unarmed suspects – especially after they've been detained – violated the law of war and could have opened up the offending country's chain of command to war-crimes charges.

However, while such actions by leaders of, say, Serbia or Sudan would provoke demands for war-crimes tribunals, other rules apply when the offending nation is the United States. Given its "superpower" status, the United States and its senior leadership appear to be effectively beyond the reach of international law – and in the case of Bush, beyond domestic accountability.

Downplaying a Slaughter

By and large, the U.S. military also has failed to impose serious punishments on American troops implicated in extrajudicial killings and massacres, even high-profile ones like the killing of two dozen Iraqis in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005, after one Marine died from an improvised explosive device.

According to published accounts of U.S. military investigations, the dead Marine's comrades retaliated by pulling five men from a cab and shooting them, and clearing two homes where civilians, including women and children, were slaughtered.

The Marines then tried to cover up the killings by claiming that the civilian deaths were caused by the original explosion or a subsequent firefight, according to investigations by the U.S. military and human rights groups.

One of the accused Marines, Sgt. Frank Wuterich, gave his account of the Haditha killings in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," including an admission that his squad tossed a grenade into one of the residences without knowing who was inside.

"Frank, help me understand," asked interviewer Scott Pelley. "You're in a residence, how do you crack a door open and roll a grenade into a room?"

"At that point, you can't hesitate to make a decision," Wuterich answered. "Hesitation equals being killed, either yourself or your men."

"But when you roll a grenade in a room through the crack in the door, that's not positive identification, that's taking a chance on anything that could be behind that door," Pelley said.

"Well, that's what we do. That's how our training goes," Wuterich said.

Eight Marines were initially charged in the Haditha case, but six cases were dropped, one Marine was acquitted, and Wuterich's case has been delayed by legal skirmishing. As in earlier cases, such as the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, courts martial have mostly focused on rank-and-file soldiers.

The lack of high-level accountability appears to stem from the fact that the key instigators of both the illegal invasion of Iraq and the harsh tactics employed in the "global war on terror" were former President Bush, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior officials. President Barack Obama has made clear he doesn't want Bush and his top aides punished.

Yet, not only did Bush order an aggressive war – what World War II's Nuremberg Tribunal called "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole" – but Bush pumped U.S. troops full of false propaganda by linking Iraq with the 9/11 attacks.

Bush's subliminal connections between the Iraq War and 9/11 continued years after U.S. intelligence dismissed any linkage. For instance, on June 18, 2005, more than two years into the Iraq War, Bush justified the invasion by telling the American people that "we went to war because we were attacked" on 9/11.

Little wonder that a poll of 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq – taken in January and February 2006 – found that 85 percent believed the U.S. mission in Iraq was mainly "to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9/11 attacks." Seventy-seven percent said a chief war goal was "to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq."

Bush's rhetorical excesses had the predictable effect of turning loose a revenge-seeking and heavily armed U.S. military force on the Iraqi population.

'Salvador Option'

By early 2005, with the Iraqi insurgency growing, an increasingly frustrated Bush administration also debated a "Salvador option" for Iraq, an apparent reference to the "death squad" operations that decimated the ranks of perceived leftists who were opposed to El Salvador's right-wing military junta in the early 1980s.

According to Newsweek magazine, President Bush was contemplating the adoption of that brutal "still-secret strategy" of the Reagan administration as a way to get a handle on the spiraling violence in Iraq.

"Many U.S. conservatives consider the policy [in El Salvador] to have been a success – despite the deaths of innocent civilians," Newsweek wrote.

The magazine also noted that many of Bush's advisers were leading figures in the Central American operations of the 1980s, such as Elliott Abrams, who became an architect of Middle East policy on the National Security Council.

In the Iraqi-sniper case, Army sniper Sandoval admitted killing an Iraqi man near the town of Iskandariya on April 27, 2007, after a skirmish with insurgents. Sandoval testified that his team leader, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered him to kill a man cutting grass with a rusty scythe because he was suspected of being an insurgent posing as a farmer.

The second killing occurred on May 11, 2007, when a man walked into a concealed location where Sandoval, Hensley and other snipers were hiding. After the Iraqi was detained, another sniper, Sgt. Evan Vela, was ordered to shoot the man in the head by Hensley and did so, according to Vela's testimony at Sandoval's court martial.

Sandoval and Hensley were acquitted of murder charges because a military jury concluded that their actions were within the rules of engagement. (Like Sandoval, Hensley was convicted of lesser charges relating to planting evidence.) But Vela was convicted of killing an unarmed Iraqi civilian and planting evidence on the body, leading to a 10-year prison sentence.

Regarding the Afghanistan case, Special Forces Capt. Staffel and Sgt. Anderson were leading a team of Afghan soldiers when an informant told them where a suspected insurgent leader was hiding. The U.S.-led contingent found a man believed to be Nawab Buntangyar walking outside his compound near the village of Hasan Kheyl.

While the Americans kept their distance out of fear the suspect might be wearing a suicide vest, the Afghanis questioned the man about his name and the Americans checked his description against a list from the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force Afghanistan, known as "the kill-or-capture list."

Concluding that the man was insurgent leader Nawab Buntangyar, Staffel gave the order to shoot, and Anderson – from a distance of about 100 yards away – fired a bullet through the man's head, killing him instantly.

The soldiers viewed the killing as "a textbook example of a classified mission completed in accordance with the American rules of engagement," the International Herald Tribune reported. "The men said such rules allowed them to kill Buntangyar, whom the American military had designated a terrorist cell leader, once they positively identified him."

Staffel's civilian lawyer Mark Waple said the Army's Criminal Investigation Command concluded that the shooting was "justifiable homicide," but a two-star general in Afghanistan instigated a murder charge against the two men. That case, however, floundered over accusations that the charge was improperly filed. [IHT, Sept. 17, 2007]

The U.S. news media has given the Fort Bragg case only minor coverage concentrating mostly on the legal sparring. The New York Times' inside-the-paper, below-the-fold headline on Sept. 19, 2007, was "Green Beret Hearing Focuses on How Charges Came About."

The Washington Post did publish a front-page story on the "bait" aspect of the Sandoval case – when family members of U.S. soldiers implicated in the killings came forward with evidence of high-level encouragement of the snipers – but the U.S. news media treated the story mostly as a minor event and drew no larger implications.

The greater significance of the cases is that they confirm the long-whispered allegations that the U.S. chain of command had approved standing orders giving the U.S. military broad discretion to kill suspected militants on sight.

Whatever the full story about President Bush's CIA hit team, the facts are already clear that his "global war on terror" had morphed into an international "dirty war" with Bush now having passed off command to President Obama.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book is, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush. He also has two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

TOON

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'Moral Twilight Zone'

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Dion Nissenbaum
July 15, 2009 - McClatchy Newspapers

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JERUSALEM - Israeli combat soldiers have acknowledged that they forced Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields, needlessly killed unarmed Gazans and improperly used white phosphorus shells to burn down buildings as part of Israel's three-week military offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter.

In filmed testimony and written statements released Wednesday, more than two dozen soldiers told an Israeli army veterans' group that military commanders led the fighters into what one described as a "moral Twilight Zone" where almost every Palestinian was seen as a threat.

Soldiers described incidents in which Israeli forces killed an unarmed Palestinian carrying a white cloth, an elderly woman carrying a sack, a Gazan riding a motorcycle, and an elderly man with a flashlight, said Breaking the Silence, a group formed by army reservists in 2004.

Any Palestinian spotted near Israeli troops was considered suspect. A man talking on a cell phone on the roof of his building was viewed as a legitimate target because he could've been telling militants where to find Israeli forces, the group quoted soldiers as saying.

"In urban warfare, everyone is your enemy," said one soldier. "No innocents."

The 110-pages of testimony - along with 16 video clips - of interviews with 26 unnamed Israeli soldiers offers the most comprehensive look inside a military campaign that's become the subject of an unfolding United Nations war crimes investigation.

The Israel Defense Forces dismissed the report.

IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said Tuesday that the IDF now is conducting dozens of investigations into troop conduct during the Gaza operation and that more than a dozen cases led to police investigations.

In April, the IDF announced it had concluded five high-level investigations, including one into the use of phosphorus to burn down buildings, and cleared itself.

Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Breaking the Silence, said the report didn't identify the soldiers by name because at least half the men quoted were young conscripts who could be jailed for speaking to the media. He agreed, however, to name the units and where they were operating in several instances.

Two soldiers from the Givati brigade who served in Zeitoun told the story of shooting an unarmed civilian without warning him.

The elderly man was walking with a flashlight toward a building where Israeli forces were taking cover.

The Israeli officer in the house repeatedly ignored requests from other soldiers to fire warning shots as the man approached, the soldiers said. Instead, when he got within 20 yards of the soldiers, the commander ordered snipers to kill the man.

The soldiers later confirmed that the man was unarmed.

When they complained to their commander about the incident, the soldiers were rebuffed and told that anyone walking at night was immediately suspect.

Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights attorney who reviewed the testimony, said the stories reflected a "dramatic change in the ethos" of the Israeli military that portrays itself as the most moral army in the world.

"What we are seeing now is a deterioration of our moral values and red lines," Sfard said. "This is a dramatic change in heart and values."

Israel launched the 22-day military offensive on Dec. 27 in a bid to destabilize the Hamas-led government and deter Palestinian militants who've fired thousands of crude rockets and mortars at southern Israel that have killed 12 people in the past four years.

Nine Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza during the fighting, four of them by friendly fire.

By contrast, Palestinian human rights groups and Gaza medical officials said that 1,400 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, were killed by Israeli forces. The Israeli military has questioned that figure, but hasn't made its own analysis available for review.

Breaking the Silence identified other specific instances in which Israeli forces carried out highly questionable practices.

According to the soldiers, the Israeli military fired white phosphorus mortars and artillery shells to set suspicious buildings ablaze and destroyed scores of Palestinian homes for questionable reasons. The white phosphorus supplied by the U.S. is supposed to be used to illuminate targets or provide smoke cover for advancing troops.

"Phosphorus was used as an igniter, simply make it all go up in flames," one soldier said.

A second soldier - said by the reservists' group to have been in a tank brigade stationed in the Atatra neighborhood - told Breaking the Silence that at least one officer fired unauthorized white phosphorus mortars because it was "cool."

The use of white phosphorus to destroy buildings was part of a larger campaign to demolish parts of Gaza to make it more difficult for Palestinian militants to fire rockets at Israel, the soldiers said.

One soldier, who served in an infantry reserve unit of the Negev Brigade near Netzarim, said they were repeatedly told by officers to raze buildings as part of a campaign to prepare for "the day after."

"In practical terms, this meant taking a house that is not implicated in any way, that its single sin is the fact that it is situated on top of a hill in the Gaza Strip," said one soldier.

"In a personal talk with my battalion commander he mentioned this and said in a sort of sad half-smile, I think, that this is something that will eventually be added to 'my war crimes," he added.

In the Ezbt Abd Rabbo neighborhood, Israeli combatants said they forced Palestinians to search homes for militants and enter buildings ahead of soldiers in direct violation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that bars fighters from using civilians as human shields.

"Sometimes a force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian's shoulder, advancing into a house and using him as a human shield," said one Israeli soldier with the Golani Brigade. "Commanders said these were the instructions, and we had to do it."

Each Palestinian forced to work with the Israeli military was given the same nickname: Johnnie.

The story was confirmed by four other Israeli soldiers who seized control of the Gaza neighborhood, but declined to speak on the record, Shaul said.

The testimony matches with that of nine Palestinian men who told McClatchy last winter that Israeli soldiers forced them into battle zones during the offensive in their northern Gaza Strip neighborhood.

One Palestinian, Castro Abed Rabbo, said Israeli soldiers ordered him to enter buildings to search for militants and booby traps before they sent in a specially trained dog with high-tech detection gear.

Two other Palestinian men told McClatchy that Israeli soldiers used them as human shields by forcing them to kneel in a field during a firefight as they exchanged fire with Gaza fighters.

"I was down on my knees and they fanned out in a 'V' behind me," Sami Rashid Mohammed, a Fatah-leaning former Palestinian Authority police officer, said in an unpublished interview in February. "It wasn't more than 10 or 15 minutes of shooting, but it was so scary."

One of the Israeli soldiers interviewed described the offensive was necessary.

"We did what we had to do," he said. "The actual doing was a bit thoughtless. We were allowed to do anything we wanted. Who's to tell us not to?"

One Israeli reservist said a brigade commander gave them stark orders as they were preparing for combat.

"He said something along the line of 'Don't let morality become an issue; that will come later,'" the soldier said. "He had this strange language: 'Leave the nightmares and horrors that will come up for later - now just shoot."

"You felt like a child playing around with a magnifying glass, burning up ants," another Israeli soldier said. "A 20-year-old kid should not be doing such things to people. . . . the guys were running a 'Wild West' scene: draw, cock, kill."

Food & Water Watch Applauds Introduction of Federal Trust Fund for Clean Water Infrastructure

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July 15 , 2009 - Food & Water Watch

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"Today, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR-3) introduced legislation to establish a Water Protection and Reinvestment Trust Fund to support investment in drinking water and clean water infrastructure. We applaud Representative Blumenauer for this vital piece of legislation, which Food & Water Watch has advocated for over the past three years.

"Structured and firewalled much like a Highway Trust Fund, the Water Protection and Reinvestment Trust Fund will be generated through the imposition of five new taxes and fees and will be distributed mainly to the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Funds. These taxes and fees include:

• A 4 cent tax on the containers of water-based beverages in glass, cans, plastic that are 5 gallons or less, not including alcoholic beverages, milk, or juice from concentrate.

• A 3 percent wholesale tax on disposable products normally flushed or disposed of through sewer systems, such as soaps, detergents, toiletries, toilet tissue, water softeners, and cooking oils.

• A .5 percent wholesale tax on pharmaceuticals.

• A .15 percent tax on corporate profits over $4 million a year.

"Clean, healthy, affordable water should be something that every American has access to, but many of the pipes that deliver this essential resource are over 100 years old and in dire need of repair. Funding for clean water is falling behind system needs--to the tune of some $22 billion a year--and as a result, many municipalities are struggling to meet federal clean water standards and to maintain and modernize their water systems. The consequences of coping with aging water systems include sewage spills that render our water unsafe for drinking, swimming, fishing, and wildlife.

"Because we cannot always rely on Congress or the president to allocate money to water infrastructure projects, we need to create a dedicated source of federal funding for drinking water and waste water infrastructure so that communities can keep their water safe, clean and affordable. The Water Protection and Reinvestment Trust Fund will create a dedicated source of federal funding so that communities can keep their water safe, clean and affordable for generations to come.

"We look forward to working with Representative Blumenauer to make sure this vital legislation is as strong as it can be, and that it is passed by Congress and enacted to law."

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Food & Water Watch is a nonprofit consumer organization that works to ensure clean water and safe food. We challenge the corporate control and abuse of our food and water resources by empowering people to take action and by transforming the public consciousness about what we eat and drink.

TOON

Financial Zen

I woke up one morning late last week to the news that taxpayers, already $149 billion in the hole in the Treasury Department's TARP bailout program, are set to lose even more. As rescued banks now try to extricate themselves from the government's control, they must buy back stock warrants proffered at the time of the bailout, which, as the New York Times described it, offer "the right to purchase shares in each of the companies at roughly the price of their shares at the time of the deals."

As it happens, thanks largely to that taxpayer-funded bailout, bank stocks have risen since last fall's meltdown. Selling those warrants, then, should mean a tidy profit for taxpayers. But no such luck, it seems. Almost a dozen small banks have already bought back their warrants, and for a considerable discount -- a mere 66% of their value -- costing taxpayers upwards of $10 million. If this were to continue when giant firms like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley come up to bat, taxpayers could be out up to $2.1 billion. Think of that as a small potential thank-you note from the banking business to Americans for helping it out of a jam.

Right behind that bit of sprightly news was a report from the Associated Press that the giant insurance firm AIG, almost 80% owned by taxpayers, was now back in consultation with the Obama administration over just how much more it should pay out in further retention bonuses -- this after multi-millions in such bonuses were already paid -- including "about $235 million for employees at AIG's financial products unit." AIG's near collapse, added the AP, "was not due to its traditional insurance operations, but instead risky derivatives contracts written by the financial products division." In addition to those traders, for 40 top execs of the dismally failed company, there is to be a payout of a mere $9 million in further bonuses for 2008. What a comedown!

— from TomDispatch

CIA’s Lies About Secret Program Should Have Congress In Open Revolt

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July 10, 2009 - ThisCantBeHappening.net

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If this were the democracy that the Founding Fathers thought they were creating, word from CIA Director Leon Panetta that his agency had lied to Congress and specifically that it had lied repeatedly from 9-11-2001 through the end of 2008 concerning an as-yet undisclosed secret program, would have virtually every member of Congress in a state of rebellion, demanding answers.

After all, the CIA is required by law to report to at least the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees and to the majority and minority leaders of both houses of Congress about such things.

But not only did the spy agency not report on what it was up to; it lied about what it was up to.

Now, given what we do know about the Bush/Cheney administration—that it initiated a massive campaign of spying on Americans by the Defense Department, the FBI, and the National Security Agency, as well as other intelligence agencies, that it initiated a campaign of torture of captives, including American citizens, while asserting that the President didn't even need to notify the courts or the public about the arrest, detention, torture or even execution of an American citizen if he, acting on his own, deemed that person to be an "enemy combatant," and given that we also know that Bush and Cheney lied repeatedly about the justification for their invasion of Iraq, and refused to be put under oath in their "interviews" by the 9-11 Commission, you would think the members of Congress, which was railroaded into supporting everything from the USA PATRIOT Act to the Iraq War invasion based on all these lies and deceptions, would be demanding answers
regarding this mysterious program.

Instead, we get vague expressions of concern, and promises of reform by congressional leaders like Rep. Steny Hoyer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and by CIA Director Panetta.

And no explanation of the program in question, even though Panetta claims it was never actually implemented.

Why, we should be asking, would the CIA have lied for eight long years about the existence of a program that it never implemented?

Anyone who believes that nonsense should be a prime target of one of those Nigerian internet scammers. There's a lot of money to be made from such suckers.

My guess is that what is being hidden here was a massive spying campaign by the Agency against Americans and/or a dirty campaign of assassinations conducted on a national and international scale—one which would assuredly have led to many deaths of innocent people.

Given that we have learned, courtesy of the excellent reporting by New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh, is that Vice President Cheney personally oversaw the operation of a secret death squad operation, called the Joint Special Operations Command, allegedly led by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, now head of US operations in Afghanistan.

Given the timing of this big CIA lying campaign—it began immediately after 9-11, right when Cheney was saying that the US would need to turn to "the dark side"—it doesn't take much imagination to suspect that this is what it is all about.

Take a bunch of power-drunk people in the White House and the Pentagon, and a cowering Congress and an American public being deliberately frightened out of its wits, a new set of laws and executive orders that give the president and his subordinates dictatorial powers that would have made Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin envious, and it's a short step to a black campaign of terror, disappearances and executions.

All of this will eventually come to light, I am sure. But it is unlikely to come to light courtesy of the Congress, which is showing all the assertiveness of a field mouse. Nor is it likely to be exposed by the corporate media, which have long since thrown in the towel on serving as a Fourth Estate. And it sure won't come from the Obama administration, which is even opposing timid calls in Congress for a broader future requirement for notification of Congress about CIA activities and actions. When it comes to exposing the crimes and abuses of the Bush/Cheney years, the Obama administration has decided it likes what it saw, and wants to continue with the new executive powers and secrecy that it inherited.

So we'll have to wait for honest whistle-blowers and for the alternative media to find out the real story here.

Jefferson, Madison et all must be cringing in their coffins at the wreckage of their creation.

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Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Lindorff's new book is "The Case for Impeachment," co-authored by Barbara Olshansky.

I've Seen 1,200 Torture Photos

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David Swanson
July 13, 2009 - The Smirking Chimp

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This moment, in which the Attorney General of the United States claims to be considering the possibility of allowing our laws against torture to be enforced seems a good one in which to reveal that I have seen over 1,200 torture photos and a dozen videos that are in the possession of the United States military. These are photographs depicting torture, the victims of torture, and other inhuman and degrading treatment. Several videos show a prisoner intentionally slamming his head face-first very hard into a metal door. Guards filmed this from several angles rather than stopping it.

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) of Australia revealed several of these photographs, video of the head slamming, and video of prisoners forced to masturbate, as part of a news report broadcast in 2006. But the full collection has not been made available to the public or to a special prosecutor, although it was shown to members of Congress in 2004. When these photos are eventually made public, I encourage you to take a good look at them. After you get over feeling ill, it might be appropriate to consider Congress' past 5 years of inaction. You'll be able to feel sick all over again.

In January 2004, the military seized photos and videos that were on computers and cell phones at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those related to the abuse of prisoners amounted, as far as I know, to those in the collection I've looked at. So, this collection does not include images of torture or mistreatment that may have taken place at Abu Ghraib after that date or at other locations at any time. I have reason to believe that such photos also exist in large quantity and depict types of abuses we have not yet seen.

Most people have seen fewer than 100 photographs from Abu Ghraib. I have posted online many of those that have been made public. These are not a bad representative sample of the whole, but they are far from complete. There are, among the more than 1,200 photos, images of prisoners and of military personnel that have not been published. There are gruesome scenes here that we have not publicly seen a single image of. And the images that we have seen are, in most cases, a single image or two from a long series of photos of an incident. In many cases, the collection includes multiple series of images from one event shot with multiple cameras. The public images have in many cases been cropped and/or censored to hide faces or genitals. In the uncropped versions there are, in some cases, additional people in the frame.

Were these Abu Ghraib photos all made public, but those from other times and places kept hidden, and were we unaware of the executive orders, Justice Department memos, presidential signing statements, congressional reports, Red Cross reports, presidential and vice presidential televised confessions, and so forth, the military could still claim this was the isolated work of a few "bad apples". But we would have a better understanding of what that work was. And making these images available to the public, or merely to a special prosecutor, would suggest an interest in seeking accountability for those responsible but not present in the photographs. On the other hand, hiding the evidence while prosecuting the soldiers who posed in some of the photos looks increasingly like scapegoating for the benefit of the Military Intelligence, CIA, and contractors who instructed the soldiers, as well as the commanders all the way up to the Secretary of Defense who
encouraged torture, the lawyers who sought to provide immunity, and the president and vice president who gave the authorizations. Remember, for Attorney General Eric Holder to decide that our laws against torture can be enforced, he does not need to wait until each new piece of evidence is revealed and then respond appropriately. He already has all of this evidence and much more that we know about but have not seen.

The over 1,200 images that I've seen add to some stories we've seen sketched out before. We've seen the body of murdered prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi packed in ice. We've seen Spc. Charles Graner posing with it, and Spc. Sabrina Harman doing the same. But the fuller collection shows the process of cleaning the body up. A giant gash in the top of the man's head is stitched up, his eye patched, etc. Photos, some of which have been made public, show floors covered with the blood of this victim.

We've also seen a few images (one, two, three) of a man attacked and bitten by dogs. But the larger series of photos shows us much more of the wounds on his legs and arms, as well as his identification number: 153863.

Another prisoner with an ID (153399) is shown missing a good portion of his head. This is one of a number of dead bodies shown in the photographs. SBS (the Australian news outlet) found an Army report on his death and concluded that these dead prisoners had likely been shot by guards during a riot or murdered by guards in other circumstances. Others have claimed mortar attacks from outside the prison are to blame.

Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman appear quite a bit in these photos, posing and smiling, but also tending to wounds. Private Lynndie England appears in a relative few, the ones we've seen with a thumbs up and pointing at masturbating prisoners. Other photos show additional military personnel. In one shot, Graner and two other male soldiers are putting a bag on a prisoner's head. In one shot a possible private contractor wears an ID badge.

There are lots of photos among the over 1,200 showing naked prisoners, sometimes chained to bunk beds or with their legs stuck through bars. There's a naked prisoner face-down on the ground with blood beside him, and with an MP on his back and two more watching.

We have previously seen and heard about a prisoner who had lost his sanity and covered himself with feces, earning the moniker "shit boy." In the larger collection, we see him naked in the shower from the front, wearing white latex gloves. We see him pinned between stretchers but also standing, sandwiched between foam mattresses chained on him like a robe, with bags tied over his hands, and in other positions. And he is reportedly the same man shown slamming his head against a door.

We see a naked, hooded prisoner standing on two MRE boxes and bent over. We see photos shot from a balcony of two prisoners sitting or squatting with their hands behind their heads, one of them on the floor and the other on an MRE box. We see a prisoner with his ID number written across his naked chest in red marker, and red marker smiley faces drawn on his nipples. (His number, obscured by his hood, is 200_ _ 4, where the first missing number is 1 or 7 and the second is 9 or 4.)

Of course, we also see the simulated electrocution photos of a hooded prisoner standing on an MRE box with wires attached to him. And we see a prisoner apparently forced to stick a banana in his anus. We see this young woman lifting her shirt up, but without the cropping, fuzzing, and blacked-out eyes. We see her together with another young woman. We see a bunch of photos of these young women posing, fully clothed. We see the first one clothed and posing with Spc. Sabrina Harman, both smiling. According to SBS the story is that the two prisoners were picked up on the charge of prostitution.

There are three photos of a little boy, naked, in a robe, and fully dressed. While it is very disturbing to see this little child's photos in the middle of this revolting collection, I have no idea what they are doing there or whether he was mistreated, or whether anyone was threatened with his mistreatment. But I do know that the leading lawyer who facilitated our national torture campaign and famously said that a U.S. president has the right to crush a child's testicles is a professor at a prestigious university, while his boss is sitting as a life-time judge in the Ninth Circuit because Congress refuses to impeach him. The current excuse for delay is that the Justice Department plans to release its internal report (from the Office of Professional Responsibility) very soon, just as it has been promising for many months. If Holder finally releases the report and simultaneously announces the appointment of a special prosecutor, two things must happen.

1. We must not allow Congress to delay impeachment of Bybee any longer with the new excuse that a criminal investigation is underway.

2. We must pressure the special prosecutor to act without delay and without considering anyone to be above the laws written by Congress.

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David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush" published by Feral House and available at Amazon.com. Swanson holds a master's degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Swanson is Co-Founder of AfterDowningStreet.org, creator of ConvictBushCheney.org and Washington Director of Democrats.com, a board member of Progressive Democrats of America, the Backbone Campaign, and Voters for Peace, a member of
the legislative working group of United for Peace and Justice, and convener of the accountability and prosecution working group of United for Peace and Justice.

TOONS

Nano-Biotechnology

Nano means billionth, so a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. That is clearly very small: on this scale, a human hair is enormous at 100 000 nm across and even red blood cells are thousands of nanometers in diameter. But a DNA molecule, for example, is 2 nm wide. At this level, the properties of materials (electronic, optical, magnetic, etc.) can differ significantly from those at a larger scale, leading to many new possible applications. Nanotechnology is the design and production of materials, devices, and systems at this fundamental, molecular scale.

Nano Today

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Now, let's turn to the Guardian and its article, "Research on tiny particles could damage brain, scientists warn."

"It's too early to be alarmed, because we don't yet know what the particles might do in humans. We shouldn't stop working with them, we should just look for what adverse effects these particles might cause," said Oberdorster. The report is due to appear in the journal Inhalation Toxicology.

"This is the first documented evidence that an innocent particle like carbon, if it's small enough, can find its way into the brain," said Professor Ken Donaldson, a toxicologist at Edinburgh University. "The worry would be if the nanotechnology business designs nanoparticles which are fundamentally different from the ones which we are already exposed to, and seem to cope with reasonably well. If very different nanoparticles are manufactured, there's a concern that they might have a different effect in the body."

Nature is also concerned.

Little is known about what effect nanoparticles will have when they reach the brain. The toxicity of the nanoparticles that are currently being used to build prototype nanosized electronic circuits -- such as carbon nanotubes, which are produced in labs around the world -- has not been thoroughly assessed.

But Donaldson says that there is a growing feeling that other nanoparticles, such as those produced by diesel exhausts, may be damaging to some parts of our body. He estimates that people in cities take in about 25 million nanoparticles with every breath. These particles are believed to increase respiratory and cardiac problems, probably by triggering an inflammatory reaction in the lungs.

Now, more experiments are needed to determine how nanoparticles can enter our brains. In the mean time, let's hope that nanotechnology research will continue and will not be harmed by a moratorium.