Obama plays God

When pro-establishment media start to be concerned about the excessive powers of the US president, it’s time for all of us to be on extra alert.

The scale of the drone warfare being escalated - by US General Petraeus and the Central Intelligence Agency on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan becomes clearer just as a strike killed another 15 people yesterday. Pakistani authorities have protested at this, the eighth and deadliest strike over the last two weeks.

That the US military uses sci-fi method of conducting its wars is not new, of course. We saw “smart bombs” being used in Iraq to wipe out enemy installations, and supposedly avoid “collateral damage”.

But the intensive use of unmanned drones to target supposed al-Qaeda leaders and militants only began in earnest after the election of President Barack Obama.  At that time, the US military and its security machine discovered that the tactics of ground invasion followed by military occupation, which brought down the Taliban in the 1990s, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, simply did not work in post 9/11 Afghanistan.

And thus, under the Obama presidency, military policy has moved into a third phase seen by observers as  the “new and as yet only partially understood doctrine of secret, unaccountable and illegal warfare.”

An essential element is the use of drones, with more drone-operators now being trained than air-pilots. And why not? It’s the politician’s and general’s dream style way of making war. Your own forces are never put in harm’s way, while you can sit in a war-room and decide who the targets should be.

And there is a secret cabal consisting of Obama and his counterterrorism advisor John Brennan and the CIA who decide who shall live or die. on the borders of Afghanistan. Pakistan and Yemen. A New York Times editorial describes it as “a unilateral campaign of death”. The transformation of Obama – the former liberal law professor– into a man who “approves lethal action without handwringing” now seems complete.

Reporters Jo Becker and Scott Shane have shown how http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?ref=opinion Obama’s aggressive counterterrorism has “baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike”.  They provide an insight into how the Obama administration takes on god-like powers over life and death:  

“It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

“This secret ‘nominations’ process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

“....The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

“Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.”

The use of drones across national borders is rightly seen by many, including the Pakistani government, as not only violating its sovereign rights as a nation, but counter-productive. According to a recent poll, more than two thirds of Pakistanis regard the United States as an enemy. Senior military experts warn that the drone attacks create more extremists than they eliminate.  From “Infinite Justice” to “Enduring Freedom” – such a war can never win.  

But Obama’s efforts to gain the moral high ground in the “war on terrorism” shows that there is less and less to distinguish him from his opponents in the Republican Party.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

It's no wonder we're sceptical about politicians

Under the radar, like a stealth bomber, Armed Forces minister Bill Rammell dropped some “friendly fire designed to stimulate debate” in a recent speech, telling his audience that the public had lost its stomach for war and was much too cynical and this was not a good thing. One reason, Rammell claims, is that “Britain's own security would be at greater risk if we again allow Afghanistan to become a safe haven for terrorists.”

Of our cynicism he gave three reasons. “The decline of deference and the growth in mistrust of those in authority”' second, the 24/7 media and third, a “freedom of information culture”. Whilst not in the top three, “the invasion of Iraq in 2003 has, in my view, had an impact on trust in government and authority and our decision making processes in general”.

Rammell told his Institute of Public Policy Research audience that, naturally, despite being a “liberal minded progressive” he remained convinced that “British participation” in the war in Iraq was right [as do Jack Straw, Alastair Campbell, Geoff Hoon, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – despite the absence of cause and legality that even the Chilcott inquiry has brought out]

While he was happy with the media now over Afghanistan, saying that since last September they “had fallen into line”, his real beef was with us, saying: “The British public have a deep respect for our Armed Forces, but respect is not the same as understanding.”

He pointed out that “the enemy is responsible for shooting at our troops” and that “we (the government) are not responsible for planting them” (roadside bombs). Blimey, I hold my hands up, I didn't know. Or that with helicopters, “in counter-insurgency warfare, as we are undertaking in Afghanistan, you have to get out of the Chinooks and the Mastiffs, sometimes patrolling on foot and among the people.” Revelatory, I had no idea.

A lot of my knowledge comes from the internet, but thankfully Rammell is on-hand to point to the dangers of this source. He quotes journalist Nik Gowing’s claim that the new information age is a 'tyranny of real time and the tyranny of the time-line”. Whatever that means.

What I do know was that last September, half of the 25 injured Afghan veterans at Selly Oak refused to speak to prime minister Brown when he paid them a visit. To quote one soldier, “The straight fact is this: we don’t like the man, he has done nothing for us and continues to kick us in the teeth over equipment and compensation.” On the question of kit, Hoon told the Iraq Inquiry on January 19 that Brown had starved the forces of cash before the Iraq invasion.

Rammell's big fear is that “if healthy scepticism becomes replaced by blanket cynicism - if every apple is considered bad and the darkest motivations always attributed - then we risk damaging the bond of trust which underpins our democracy between the public, their political representatives and public servants.”

Risk damaging? Damaged. In Afghanistan, history tells us that for the last 200 years you can't win there. Politicians like Rammell tell us British troops have to be in Afghanistan to protect us from terrorism. But compared to alcohol-related deaths or heart disease, deaths from terrorism are way off the scale, almost non-existent in the UK. Instead of spending billions of taxpayers’ money on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, why are we not spending it on more urgent things?

More generally, with the global financial crisis, banks bail out, forthcoming cuts in public services, Iraq and the MPs expenses scandal is it any wonder the British people are so cynical of their political representatives and public servants?

Dylan Strain

Ending the 'war on terror'

So now air passengers will be subjected to the equivalent of a strip search as the futile “war on terror” enters its second decade. The next step, surely, is to get travellers to leave all their clothes in a bag and fly in a bathrobe. This is how absurd the world has become, with no solution in sight.

Gordon Brown’s plan to call an international conference on Yemen – where the Christmas Day bomb-in-the-pants former Nigerian student received his training – and fund a “counter-terrorism unit” in the country won’t make blind bit of difference. Yemen is facing an insurrection in the north and a secessionist movement in the south and the government is widely seen as a stooge of major Western powers.

It is not as if Britain is unaware of what happens in Yemen. The port of Aden was seized by Britain in 1839 and a colony established in the same year. Considered strategically important as an outpost on the Arabian peninsula, Britain brutally resisted independence demands and South Yemen only won its freedom in 1967, uniting with the north in 1990.

Terrorism, whatever its shape or form, is an extreme reaction to injustices, perceived or real. Islamic-inspired individual terrorism is no different in this respect. And, because it plays into the hands of the oppressor by targeting ordinary people, terrorism is profoundly reactionary. The Al Qaeda brand is in its own league, spurning political “solutions” in favour of annihilation of the enemies of its view of Islam, including other Muslims.

Yet they continue to recruit bright students like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab because the grievances felt by Muslims around the world are deep. Moreover, the injustices are ignored by the major powers whose views are only modernised versions of their imperialist predecessors.

The greatest wrong is undoubtedly visited upon the Palestinians. Here double standards know no bounds. The Gazans hold an election and elect Hamas, so it is boycotted because it refuses to accept the state of Israel. In Afghanistan, meanwhile, the client president is allowed to steal the election because he does what the Americans want.

Israel’s government is contemptuous of the Obama administration’s puny attempts to broker a deal with the Palestinians. Settlement building continues unchecked because the White House will always yield to the Israel lobby and do nothing. The United Nations may condemn war crimes in Gaza, but the US will vote against the report. Gaza will remain blockaded and half starved and the world’s governments turn a blind eye.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan remains occupied by American and British troops. And to add insult to injury, Iran is about to face US-led sanctions for allegedly attempting to build a nuclear bomb while Israel, which has dozens of nuclear weapons, once again escapes scot free.

The governments of the United States, Britain and other major powers are incapable of addressing the causes of modern terrorism and resort to ever more draconian “security” measures which, naturally, work only for a short period and are, therefore, no solution in any meaningful sense.

Yet there is another dimension to the growth of Islamic-inspired terrorism. A few generations ago, many young Muslims would have been drawn into national revolutionary struggles, where political programmes and solutions took precedence over religious outlook. Most if not all of these national movements degenerated over time for a variety of reasons. For example, in place of the revolutionary Nasser in Egypt you have the corrupt and repressive Mubarak, whose government helps the Israelis in their blockade of Gaza.

Radical Islam has in some respects stepped into the vacuum left by the failure of secular nationalism, which in turn was heavily influenced by reactionary Stalinism both locally and internationally. The development of fresh internationalist revolutionary thinking and practice which takes us beyond the discredited regimes of Cairo and London is key to finding a way forward from humanity’s present impasse.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

The 'war on terror' unravels

The inquiry into New Labour’s involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq opens just as unrest is growing over the rising rate of casualties amongst British and American troops in Afghanistan. On both sides of the Atlantic, the fall-out from the “war against terror” is growing.

Yesterday morning, a serving British soldier, Lance Corporal Joe Glenton, handed in a letter to 10 Downing Street in which he said that his fellow soldiers had “become a tool of American foreign policy”. Glenton, the first British soldier to speak out publicly against the Afghan war, is due to return to duty but has refused and has been court-martialled for desertion in proceedings due to start on Monday. He could face two years in prison.

In his letter he said: "I have seen qualities in the Afghan people which have also been for so long apparent and admired in the British soldier. Qualities of robustness, humour, utter determination and unwillingness to take a step backwards. However it is these qualities, on both sides, which I fear will continue to cause a state of attrition. These will only lead to more heartbreak within both our societies." Glenton said he gradually became aware that justifications for occupying Afghanistan rang hollow. "The Afghan people were attacking us, even though our politicians said we were going in to help them. It came as a real shock."

On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans are intrigued by Time magazine’s account of the internecine conflicts between former president George W.Bush and his mentor and vice-president Dick Cheney, who masterminded the “war on terror” in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. and developed plans that neutralised rights enshrined in the US constitution itself.

The Obama administration and Democratic lawmakers are looking into why Cheney insisted that covert CIA policies and actions were kept from Congress and how Cheney protected Scooter Libby, his top aide. In March 2007, Libby was convicted of obstructing an investigation into the leak of a CIA officer’s identity in revenge for her husband’s criticism of the Iraq war. Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, plus a $250,000 fine. Although the sentence was commuted on appeal, the affair marked a turning point in the Bush presidency, in which Cheney ally Donald Rumsfeld was also sidelined. Cheney hoped to get Libby pardoned but Bush, who had the power to grant a pardon as he left office, refused.

Despite his loss of power in the White House, Cheney pushed ahead with sinister plans to “bolster security” by having 20,000 uniformed troops within the United States by 2011. Supposedly trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, the use of troops for “homeland security”, has come under strong criticism from within the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians. They say that the new domestic emphasis could be in breach of the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

Earlier this week, Jason Leopold of Truth Out, revealed revealed that Cheney pressurised Bush to deploy US soldiers against suspected terrorists in Buffalo, New York in October 2008. A Justice Department legal opinion asserted that the president had unlimited powers to prosecute the “war on terror” on American soil and could ignore constitutional rights, including First Amendment freedoms of speech and the press and Fourth Amendment requirements for search warrants. This has since been rejected by the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, while Bush has gone quietly into retirement, Cheney is leading the right-wing counter-attack on Obama, openly questioning the president’s legitimacy as well as patriotism. Undoubtedly we have not heard the last of Cheney or the sinister groups within the American state that he fronts for. He is only just in the shadows.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Poor bloody infantry pays the price

New Labour lied about the reasons for invading Iraq and now they are doing the same about the purpose of the continued occupation of Afghanistan. In fact, ministers have the blood of the young British soldiers on their hands. They are the sacrificial lambs of a failing neo-colonial policy which messages of condolence cannot conceal.

Prime minister Brown and the rest of the talking parrots in the cabinet are deceiving everyone, including the families of the bereaved, when they claim that the soldiers, some as young as 18, are dying on the front line in Afghanistan so that British citizens can walk the streets safely.

This is simply a repeat of the failed mantra of the “war on terror” that New Labour signed up to under George W. Bush’s presidency (which was extended to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq). Obama’s White House has simply dusted down the doctrine and given it a “human face” with talk of “nation building” and minimising civilian deaths in place of torture and random air strikes.

In any case, the idea that fighting the Taliban makes British citizens safer from terror attacks is clearly delusional. It conjures up a 19th century vision of uncivilised and ungrateful Afghans heading for Britain armed to the teeth in search of revenge. As for defeating the Taliban to thwart Al-Qaeda, they are by common consent in Pakistan not Afghanistan and their reach is global rather than national.

The only significant terror attack in Britain, in July 2005, was carried out by British-born Muslims angered by US and British support for Israel’s war on the Palestinians while they invaded Iraq. Significantly, a recent survey for the BBC found that 76% of young Muslims in Britain thought that Britain and the US were wrong to intervene in Afghanistan, while only 25% “fully understood the reasons” for the occupation. You can draw your own conclusions about the implications of this finding if the occupation is allowed to continue.

Rory Stewart, who has been a soldier, diplomat and academic and has travelled extensively in Afghanistan and Iraq, has exposed the government’s policy of building a “stable Afghanistan” as a nonsense when he wrote recently:

Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising language that can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.
It conjures nightmares of "failed states" and "global extremism", offers the remedies of "state-building" and "counter-insurgency", and promises a final dream of "legitimate, accountable governance". It papers over the weakness of the international community: our lack of knowledge, power and legitimacy. It conceals the conflicts between our interests: between giving aid to Afghans and killing terrorists. It assumes that Afghanistan is predictable. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate.

As always, the poor bloody infantry, or the PBI as British foot soldiers have referred to themselves down the ages as they suffered under incompetent leadership and failed strategies, are paying the price for the Afghan military adventure. Evidence is mounting that New Labour is not even prepared to spend the money to protect and equip the PBI adequately in a war that produces nothing but misery for ordinary people in both countries. Perhaps Brown and company ought to be sent to Afghanistan to try their hand at “nation-building” themselves following their great successes in Britain.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

Afghan 'Crusaders' claim more lives

The election of Barack Obama has definitely made a difference to the lives of the people of Afghanistan – his administration will offer a public apology and an inquiry when dozens of civilians are indiscriminately killed by American warplanes. And that’s it.

Apart from sanctimonious words from Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, there is no essential difference from the policies pursued by George W. Bush. The spurious “war on terror” continues, with over 60,000 foreign troops in occupation of Afghanistan. Obama is rushing another 30,000 American soldiers to the country shortly.

Rohul Amin, governor of Western Farah province where the bombing took place during a battle on Monday and Tuesday, said he feared 100 civilians had been killed. Others said the death toll could be even higher. If confirmed, it could make the incident the single deadliest for Afghan civilians since the US invasion in 2001.

Jessica Barry, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, also sent a team which reached the scene of the air strikes yesterday. "There were women and there were children who were killed. It seemed they were trying to shelter in houses when they were hit," she said. The team saw houses destroyed and dozens of bodies. Barry said that among those killed was a first aid volunteer for Afghanistan's Red Crescent, who died along with 13 members of his family.

As for inquiries, they are ten a penny when it comes to atrocities like these, in Afghanistan, Iraq or even Occupied Palestine. The Israelis hold them into the brutal actions of their soldiers. The United Nations holds inquiries into Israeli war crimes in Gaza – and, of course, nothing happens, apart from the fact that the Israeli government rejects the findings out of hand. The killing goes on.

The Israelis will say that Palestinian civilians were used as human shields, as if this justified the use of banned phosphorous bombs and shooting civilians out of hand; the Americans will say that the Taleban were definitely in the vicinity when their brave pilots launched the air strikes. And the killing will go on.

And if civilians evade the bombs in Afghanistan, there is always a chance that latter-day Crusaders, aka the US army, will tell you that Islam is bad and that Christianity is good. Al Jazeera has broadcast a video showing US soldiers being instructed by the military’s top chaplain to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.

The footage was shot by Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former fighter pilot. In his report for Al Jazeera, Hughes revealed that soldiers had imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, Afghan languages. After the Pentagon disputed his account, he retorted: “[U.S. soldiers] weren’t talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons.” Hughes told Al Jazeera: “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”

Today, Afghans staged an angry protest in the town of Farah, the provincial capital of the province where the bombing took place. They threw stones. Protesters were reportedly injured after shots were fired. The killing will go on.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Demand the release of Hicham Yezza!

Hicham Yezza’s real “crime” was to help a student with his research into Al Qaeda and then to campaign against his arbitrary arrest and detention by the police, called in by his employers, Nottingham University. A nine-month jail sentence he is now serving for immigration “irregularities” is nothing less than the state’s revenge for failing to sustain the original ludicrous terrorism arrest.

Hicham was arrested and held last May for a period of six days, alongside student Rizwaan Sabir. Hicham had downloaded an Al Qaeda training manual from the US government's website. It was material for Sabir's MA dissertation, which didn’t prevent university authorities assuming the worst and calling in the police.


Sabir’s home was raided and he was deeply distressed by events. In the end, no charges could be made and the pair were released. But with egg all over their faces, the police tried to justify their actions and held Hicham, an Algerian national, on immigration charges pending fast-track deportation. This failed following a strong campaign and legal challenges and Hicham, who edits the magazine Ceasefire, spoke out at conferences about the attacks on human rights in Britain.

Not giving up, immigration authorities then charged Hicham with "securing avoidance of enforcement action by deceptive means". This, don’t forget, was someone employed by the university, a PhD student and a well-known figure on campus. As his lawyer Caroline Bradley, said: "He did not in any way try to hide his identity and, if he had done things properly, he would have been granted in all likelihood the right to stay in this country." Although we are talking technicalities here, the judge threw the book at Hicham and he is now in prison.

Hicham’s jailing expresses not only how the spurious “war on terror” sweeps up innocent victims on a daily basis – Binyam Mohamed’s “rendition” and torture is just one example – but how this dovetails with New Labour’s racist and inhuman immigration/deportation policies. These are deployed to court the support of right-wing newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express – and to provide business for the private sector.

Since 1993 there has been a 10-fold increase in detention centre places. From a total of 10 immigration detention centres in the UK, seven are managed by private firms. They are beset with welfare problems, social unrest and high rates of suicide. Plans for an 800-place centre near Bullingdon prison in Oxfordshire will make it the largest detention centre of its kind in Europe.

Every year, 2,000 children are detained in contravention of commitments made in Parliament. In a recent case, a court was told that a one-year-old baby and an eight-year-old child from the Democratic Republic of Congo were deeply traumatised after immigration officers twice raided their West Midlands home. They were taken to Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire and held for 57 days. Two months later, the family home was raided for a second time leading to a further three-day unlawful detention at the same centre. The court awarded the former detainees £150,000 in damages.

With even Tory Mayor of London Boris Johnson calling for an "earned" amnesty for migrants without papers – up to 75% of the estimated 725,000 total live in the capital – New Labour’s cynical use of the immigration card is even more despicable. As unemployment mounts and the far-right BNP challenges New Labour for votes, the press hysteria is bound to intensify. That’s why A World to Win demands the release of Hicham Yezza, who is a political prisoner, and supports the employment and human rights of ALL workers in Britain, with or without papers.

You can write to Hicham at:
Hicham Yezza XP266 06.12.1977
Woodhill
Tattenhoe Street
Milton Keynes
Buckinghamshire
MK4 4DA

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

A victim of New Labour's thought police

According to Hicham Yezza, the Home Office operates with a “Gestapo mentality”, especially when dealing with foreign nationals. Hicham, an active member of the academic community at the University of Nottingham, should know. He is in detention, facing rapid deportation to Algeria, an innocent victim of New Labour’s spurious “war on terror”.

Hicham’s nightmare began when he offered to print a long document about Al Qaeda for a student who couldn’t afford to do so himself. The document was downloaded from a US government website and was background for a dissertation. Step forward the thought police, aka the university authorities. They weren’t going to let academic freedom or human rights stand in their way, and alerted the police. The frightened, small-minded authorities were, of course, just carrying out government instructions to report behaviour thought to be “suspicious”.

Hicham was promptly arrested along with another student under the government’s anti-terror laws. After six days of detention, both were released without charge. With egg on their faces from a wrongful arrest, the police decided that Hicham was fair game anyway and he was promptly handed over to the immigration authorities and charged with some visa infraction. With Hicham due to contest this, the charges were dropped in favour of a “fast track” deportation to Algeria without a hearing.

Yet Hicham has lived, worked and studied in Nottingham for the past 13 years. He won scholarships to study for two degrees and was later employed by the university. Hicham is the long-time editor of Ceasefire magazine, the journal of Nottingham Student Peace Movement. During his time at Nottingham, Hicham has served as a member of the Student’s Union Executive Committee, and on the University Senate.

Hicham’s case has enraged many students and staff as well as local MP Alan Simpson. He has protested to the immigration minister, Liam Byrne, and Simpson said: "It seems to me that this is a clumsy response under anti-terrorism legislation to the incident at Nottingham University. I can see no reason for an emergency deportation other than to cover the embarrassment of police and intelligence services.”

Supporters, who will rally outside the university library tomorrow, have been able to talk with Hicham and he told them: “The Home Office operates with a Gestapo mentality. They have no respect for human dignity and human life. They treat foreign nationals as disposable goods - the recklessness and the cavalier approach they have belongs to a totalitarian state.” The support he has received, Hicham added, was “extremely heartening and humbling” and reflected “the spirit of the generous, inclusive Britain we know - and not the faceless, brutal, draconian tactics of the Home Office”.

The British state under New Labour is now into its sixth piece of “anti-terror” legislation since 2000, all of which have eroded human rights and criminalised the Muslim community. The latest bill contains measures that ride roughshod over the rule of law, especially the ancient right to be charged and brought before a court or set free. The proposal for up to 42 days pre-charge detention is tantamount to imprisonment without trial. It is also long enough to inflict severe psychological and physical damage on people picked up under this dictatorial plan.

As social revolt grows over the impact of the global economic crisis in terms of food and fuel prices – lorry drivers are staging a mass protest in London today – the potential for using anti-terror laws against a range of protestors is clearly present. Discredited New Labour is desperately clinging to power and will deploy the state where necessary in an arbitrary and provocative fashion. The defence of human rights in Britain is inseparable from a campaign to fashion a real political democracy in place of the authoritarian, surveilance state that is oppressing Hicham and countless others.


Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

To support Hicham’s right to stay in Britain, you can contact the campaign on 07948590262 or by email at staffandstudents@googlemail.com.

The Afghan debacle

Gordon Brown claims that recent fighting at Musa Qala is a turning point in the six-year war against the Taleban in Afghanistan. The truth is that British and NATO operations in the country have been an unmitigated debacle and a suicide mission for many of the troops involved.

Even Brown’s allies in the “war against terror” - the justification for invading Afghanistan in the first place - don’t necessarily share the prime minister’s confidence. The Bush adminstration and NATO have just launched three major reviews of the entire Afghan mission, ranging from security and counter-terrorism to political and economic development. The New York Times says that the reviews are an admission that earlier successes in fighting the Taleban and Al Qaeda forces may have evaporated.

This has been the most violent year since the invasion of 2001. One senior NATO diplomat has admitted that “now we have significant issues with certain areas producing opium and the Taleban coming back in certain parts of the country, as well”. In addition, the allies are less than complimentary about each other: “The Germans, the Spanish, the Italians don’t send any troops to the south except for 250 troops by Germany,” said Representative Joe Sestak. A retired three-star admiral, Sestak complained that some allies “refuse to do combat ops at night and some don’t fly when the first snowflake falls”.

The balance sheet is as follows:
- a six year-occupation by NATO forces
- 40,000 troops, plus 12,000 other US troops conducting “counter- terrorism” operations
- illegal imprisonment of innocent people at Guantanamo
- billions spent on military operations
- £18 billions spent on NGOs
- high altitude bombing which has killed countless villagers
- a suicide mission in Helmand – dubbed “Hell-land” by British troops – with £1bn being spent on a new base there
- a resurgent Taleban roaming freely through most parts of the country outside Kabul.

And what has all this meant for the people of Afghanistan? Here is what Khaled Hosseini (author of The Kite Runner, which opens as a film next week) found when he returned to his hometown Kabul for the first time in 30 years. The capital, home to some three million people, is nothing less than a disaster area. The poverty and disarray in many areas was, in Hosseini’s words, “unspeakable”.

While visiting the grave of a popular Afghan singer, he was “mobbed again by burqa-clad women and barefoot children, their hair matted with dirt, faces oozing with sores, their teeth rotting already, begging for baksheesh [alms].” A Kabul policeman complained to him about the millions in aid given to the NGOs who spent it on fancy cards, offices and guesthouses.

Whilst the NATO occupation of Afghanistan cannot be blamed entirely for the destruction of what was once a beautiful country and capital city – the Soviet invasion and the Taleban are also responsible - it is certain that six years of occupation and war by mainly US and British forces have taken the country further down the road to hell.

So what exactly is the purpose of this mission, if it cannot succeed? As British forces withdraw from Basra, openly admitting to television cameras, that to remain in Iraq would only unite people against them, Brown badly needs to point to success in Afghanistan as his grip on the economy is seen to falter. It is a heavy price to pay for enhancing the tarnished image of a British Prime Minister.

Corinna Lotz
AWTW secretary

Everyone's a 'suspect'

Just in case you thought New Labour’s planned new anti-terror laws were bad enough, pay attention to what the European Union is cooking up. This undemocratic, bureaucratic organisation is bringing forward a raft of measures that add to the growth of a European-wide authoritarian state.

The workings of the EU are obscure but thanks to Statewatch we can just about fathom out what’s going on. In its latest bulletin, the independent monitoring group analyses new terrorism laws planned by the European Commission. These would create three new categories of criminal offence: provocation to commit terrorism, recruitment for terrorism and training for terrorism. The "provocation" offence is extremely broad, as it does not require a direct encouragement to commit terrorist acts but applies to any statements which create a "danger" of such acts being committed. Statewatch warns:

“The wording of this definition is clearly likely to result in the criminalisation of the expression of political views (for example on the situation in Middle East or on certain conflicts within Member States) even if that expression does not in any way include the advocacy of terrorism to support those opinions. It will be enough that the authorities deem that there is a ‘danger’ that this will happen.”

Then there are the plans to fingerprint all children over six for EU passports. The commission would have included even younger children but the idea was rejected because the under-6s don’t yet have fully-identifiable fingerprints! Finally, this week the European Commission announced plans for a PNR (passenger name record) scheme to monitor all travel in and out of the EU. Similar data is already being collected under a EU-US scheme that sailed through without parliamentary approval.

All passengers, including visitors from the USA, will be “profiled” to see if they constitute a “risk”. If they are, they can be refused entry. The "profile" will be updated and held for 13 years. This will involve millions of quite innocent people being kept on record. Tony Bunyan, Statewatch editor, comments: "This is yet another measure that places everyone under surveillance and makes everyone a ‘suspect’ without any meaningful right to know how the data is used, how it is further processed and by whom. We have already got the mandatory taking of fingerprints for passports and ID cards and the mandatory storage of telecommunications data of every communication, now we are to have the mandatory logging of all travel in and out of the EU.

“The underlying rationale for each of the measures is the same - all are needed to tackle terrorism. Yet there is little evidence that the gathering of mountain upon mountain of data on the activities of every person in the EU makes a significant contribution. On the other hand, the use of this data for other purposes, now or in the future, will make the EU the most surveilled place in the world".

Bunyan says that the "profiling" of all airline passengers has “no place in a democracy”. He is right. The trouble is that behind the façade of parliamentary democracy, a terrifying authoritarian state is nearing completion. It’s an EU-wide project in which the New Labour government plays the leading role.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

Canada joins terror witch-hunt

As the police use anti-terror laws to harass climate protesters at the Heathrow climate camp, governments around the world are making copycat versions of Britain’s detention and secret trials powers. Canada is not usually viewed as an authoritarian state, but Stephen Harper’s right-wing government, elected in January 2006, is pushing through legislation based closely on the provisions enacted into British law under New Labour. A human rights organisation is warning of “secret trials and a binge of government secrecy” set for the autumn parliamentary session in Canada using Britain’s “special advocates” system as a model.

A constitutional conflict broke out in Canada at the end of February as the Supreme Court ruled, in a unanimous 9-0 decision, that the country’s notorious secret hearing procedure was unconstitutional and violated the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The clash between the Supreme Court and the government closely paralleled that in Britain, where an 8-1 decision by the House of Lords in December 2004 ruled that police could not detain foreign suspects indefinitely without bringing them to trial.

A Kafkaesque security certificate process has been condemned as “fundamentally flawed and unfair” because it is secret, with no procedural safeguards and the person named in the certificate is not informed of the case against them. The security certificates allow the authorities to detain and remove a person considered to be a security threat. Signed by the solicitor-general and the minister of citizenship and immigration, and endorsed by a judge of the Federal Court, they have been issued 28 times since 1978. The Federal Court of Canada, which is appointed by the government, is now trying to legitimise secret trials by having special advocates, or “security-cleared” lawyers who will be able to hear secret evidence in the absence of the accused and their lawyers.

Tensions are building because although the Supreme Court ruled against the certificate procedure, it suspended its judgment from taking effect for a year, thereby giving Parliament time to write a new law. The government-appointed Federal Courts Administration Service has been given an August 31 deadline to turn in a report about the so-called security certificates, which, is already shaping the process before anything is tabled in Parliament.

The Federal Court has commissioned an immigration lawyer and a university professor to produce a study on the British special advocates system in an attempt to legitimise secret trials. Matthew Behrens, writing for the Campaign Against Secret Trials, has denounced the “special advocates” system. He has shown that it is in fact a special advocate for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Behrens points to British barrister Ian Macdonald QC’s statement before the Canadian Parliament last February in which he explained why he resigned as a British special advocate: “I was giving legitimacy to a system… completely contrary to all kinds of traditions of a) fairness and b) the fact that ever since Magna Carta, we don’t imprison people unless they’ve had a proper trial.”

Behrens says that Canada’s role as part of a global national security system in which the rights of certain targeted populations are sacrificed in the nebulous name of security. “The rights being violated, needless to say, are basic human rights that apply to all people, regardless of citizenship status.,” he argues, in an in-depth analysis circulated by Homes Not Bombs, the Toronto chapter of Action for Social Change. He says that claims by CSIS and RCMP that threats cannot be revealed to the public are comparable to tactics used by anti-Communist Senator Joe McCarthy during the red-baiting 1950s. The CSIS has claimed that animal rights activists, First Nation “extremists”, elements of the anti-globalisation movement and Sunni Muslims are threats to Canada’s national security. Sounds like a story we hear every day in Britain, doesn’t it?

Corinna Lotz, AWTW secretary

A global war on rights

The global “war on terror” has truly become the global war of terror against people’s human rights. In Australia, a terror suspect freed on bail is immediately held on spurious immigration charges; in Britain, a senior police officer calls for indefinite detention of suspects; in Germany, the interior minister suggests target killing of terror suspects; in the Philippines, new anti-terror laws come into force today. This morning, normally hard-bitten Australian journalists were shocked when a doctor, Mohamed Haneef, who was released on A$10,000 bail was immediately taken into detention in Brisbane on the orders of immigration minister Kevin Andrews. The minister said he was satisfied that Haneef had failed the “character test” required under immigration regulations. In an often heated exchange, Andrews was asked: "What chances does this fellow have of gaining justice in this country when he faces criminal charges in one court, and in another place, in a sort of a Catch-22, a minister of the crown declares that he's a terrorist?" Another said: “Doesn't this go against the legal rule that we've established over a thousand years? That someone is innocent until proven guilty. You're pre-empting a judgment on his innocence."

Equally shocked was Stephen Estcourt, president of the Australian Bar Association, who said he could not believe the minister's action. "He can't do that," said Estcourt. He said the minister was "usurping the role of the court" to take action now. "Usually this sort of visa cancellation takes place after charges have been laid against someone and they’ve run their course and they've resulted in a penalty being imposed... I have not heard of this power being used pre-emptively in this way. It has got to be seen as a threat to the rule of law if a ministerial discretion is used to effectively reverse, or to reverse for practical purposes a decision of the court. And it's sophistry to say that one's got nothing to do with the other."

While the Howard government rides roughshod over the presumption of innocence, in Britain we are being softened up for an extension of the anti-terror laws by the Brown regime. Doing New Labour’s bidding is Ken Jones, the president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). He told The Observer that in some cases there was a need to hold terrorist suspects without charge for “as long as it takes”. Jones, a former chair of ACPO's counter-terrorism committee, said: “We are now arguing for judicially supervised detention for as long as it takes. We are up against the buffers on the 28-day limit. We understand people will be concerned and nervous, but we need to create a system with sufficient judicial checks and balances which holds people, but no longer than a day [more than] necessary. We need to go there [unlimited detention] and I think that politicians of all parties and the public have great faith in the judiciary to make sure that's used in the most proportionate way possible.”

This global assault on rights has little to do with fighting terrorism. As we have said before, no self-respecting terrorist is concerned about tighter laws and the threat of being held without trial, or even being tortured for that matter. The authoritarian clampdown will, in fact, encourage terrorists to believe that they have their targets on the run. Creating an atmosphere of permanent tension is, however, a more than useful way of justifying the power of the state over its citizens. And so much the better if it helps to silence dissent, and widen the net so that radical, political opponents are ensnared. All that is left is for Brown to bring Jones of ACPO into his government of “all the talents”.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

Taking a leaf out of the Stasi's book

In former East Germany, the hated Stasi – or state security police – just about had one half of the population spying on the other. While that is now the stuff of films like Other People’s Lives, the spirit of the Stasi lives on the shape of one Admiral Sir Alan West, who is a security minister in the Brown government of “all the talents”. Leaving aside the fact that West was in charge of the navy, where terrorism is not exactly top of the Admiralty’s agenda, his suggestion that people should “snitch” on suspicious neighbours is right out the Stasi’s handbooks. He didn’t elaborate on what constitutes “suspicious” activities, but they could well include the following acts by members of the Muslim community:

• buying stuff for barbecues from a DIY store (this is doubly suspicious because the weather is so bad at the moment)
• looking for articles on the Internet critical of the Bush-Brown policies towards Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Chechnya etc
• being overheard in a supermarket discussing the background to terrorist attacks
• suggesting in a public place that British foreign policy may well have contributed to the threat of terror attacks
• failing to greet a member of the police force as a friend and a person who would never knowingly abuse a member of a minority community
• declining to support England at football, cricket or rugby
• a refusal to integrate by, for example, insisting on cooking curries or living next door to nice, white, middle-class folk (who, of course, are not required to integrate with anyone)
• not engaging in serious and sustained binge drinking along with the majority population
• carrying large parcels or backpacks
• acting in a manner that could generally cause alarm amongst a fearful population.

There are no doubt many other aspects of strange behaviour that people ought to be on the look out for because, as West told us, the war on terror will last at least 15 years. So in approximately 2022 we will all be allowed to return to life as we once knew it – but only if we snoop and snitch. This is, of course, New Labour fantasy land, made more dubious by Brown’s love-in with military figures like West, who bypass party membership to join the government. This same team brought you the Iraq war and the occupation of Afghanistan – and what great success stories they have turned out to be. Iraq is in ruins and the Taleban are making a comeback in Afghanistan.

Although it is true that Islamic-inspired terrorism has a long history, the British people themselves have become a terror target principally because of these imperial policies. Blind terror is, of course, reactionary to the core and has to be condemned. But finding a way forward will require at the minimum progressive, alternative policies at all levels – social, economic, political, military. Yet today, David Miliband, the new foreign secretary, attacked Iran and stoked up the pressure on Teheran about its nuclear programme. So we’re left with the admiral’s plan to alert the authorities about suspicious Muslims. In the end, of course, the Stasi played a major part in the disintegration of the very state they were supposed to protect. Hopefully, New Labour is set on a similar course.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

Terrorism and 'our way of life'

The near-miss terror attacks in London and Glasgow reveal the futility of the government’s policies and methods, which all lead in one direction – towards full-scale, authoritarian rule. For, in the end, the government’s aim of “defeating terrorism” will require a police state apparatus on an immense and permanent scale. Clearly, MI5 and the police knew nothing about those who tried to blow up a London night club and Glasgow airport’s terminal. This is despite the fact that MI5’s budget has been doubled under New Labour. To remedy that situation, the state will need to know what everyone is thinking and doing, especially those living in minority communities. One half of the country will have to spy on the other half, turning Britain into a nation of informers. The Blair government went a long way down this road, handing the police immense new powers under a series of anti-terror laws. These undermined the principle of habeas corpus, which is supposed to prevent detention without charge or trial. Brown intends to go further, extending the period police can hold suspects and allowing the state to use telephone intercepts in court.

But new laws, however draconian, will make not a jot of difference when it comes to “defeating terrorism”. No self-respecting terrorist will be deterred by the threat of imprisonment or detention without trial. They are committed to their destructive, reactionary acts for ideological reasons. Many are prepared to die in committing atrocities, as the people of Iraq discover to their cost in an horrific way each day. Terrorists do not care if they effectively strengthen the hand of the state they actually oppose.

The prospect of a full-scale police state, parallel with a permanent threat of terror attacks, is unacceptable, self-defeating and, of course, no solution to the issue at hand. So what is the alternative? Brown says he wants to win the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim community in Britain, to encourage them to oust the extremists from their midst. How arrogant this sermonising approach is. We live in an unequal, capitalist society where the “values” of society are more often than not set down by the ruling elites in order to keep the rest of us in check. Being “fair and tolerant”, for example, does not prevent the government from demonising minorities and running scare stories about immigration and integration on a weekly basis to feed the right-wing tabloid press. Muslim communities suffer disproportionately from low-pay, unemployment and poor housing. In Brown’s competitive, “open markets” society, they and other poor people have to sink or swim.

Internationally, “our way of life” is not that attractive to other people. Britain and the United States have together destroyed Iraq as a functioning society, creating a cause celebre for terrorists all over the planet and are restoring the credibility of the Taliban in Afghanistan. They prop up despotic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel, to name but a few countries, and have driven despairing Palestinians to the point of civil war. The corporate-driven globalisation that Brown champions continues to widen the chasm of inequality worldwide. Only today, the United Nations warned that the whole of sub-Saharan Africa - the poorest region of the world - will fail to meet the goals set seven years ago for eradicating global poverty by 2015. The UN said the world was failing in the battle to combat hunger, cut infant mortality and put every child in school. Creating social and cultural conditions where terrorism is not an attractive option is patently beyond the capacity of globalised capitalism. That is the dilemma we have to grasp as a matter of urgency.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

GlobalTorture.com

You might have imagined that recent media exposure of the CIA’s worldwide programme of torture and rendition flights has curbed what the European Parliament has called illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. But in fact the CIA has simply moved its operations from Poland and Romania to other countries and continues to work closely with repressive regimes around the world, including those in North Africa.

Evidence of one CIA interrogation and torture centre surfaced two days ago in the form of a letter from Ramzi Bettibi, a Tunisian prisoner. It is published on a blog site. “This is a call from my imprisonment” Bettibi writes. “It’s a call to the world to save me from imminent danger to my safety. At the end of last April, I was transferred to another prison located 15 minutes driving from my previous Bizerte Civil prison. I was totally shocked when I found myself in a secret CIA detention where other detainees also were held in containers."

Ramzi is serving a four-year sentence at Bizerte, 65 kilometres from Tunis, for copying, onto a forum board he moderated, an online statement from a group threatening terror attacks if former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon attended the World Summit on the Information Society that was held in Tunisia in 2005. Ramzi Bettibi was arrested on 15 March 2005 at the internet café where he worked.

Sami Ben Gharbia, Advocacy Director at Global Voices, describes how Bettibi’s letter was smuggled out of a secret detention facility near Bizerte city, where he has been interrogated by CIA and French-speaking agents about his alleged ties to Jihadist groups in Iraq and online activities.

Bettibi’s letter offers the first concrete evidence of the existence of such facility in Tunisia. It also details the prison’s possible location and the identities of some of the prisoners who are being interrogated and held clandestinely. Ironically, the letter was written on June 9, one day only after the publication of the second report Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states adopted by the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.

“I was interrogated by a French-speaking person about my online relationship with Iraqi Jihadist groups. I mentioned to him that his information is totally not accurate and I’m a free speech prisoner. I also told him that HRW, Amnesty, and many other organizations have talked about my case. The American interrogator so surprisingly yelled at the Tunisian officers. They assaulted and threatened me with fabricating a story of my attempting to escape from prison. They also threatened to relocate me to another secret prison if I talked to my family about what I saw.

“Things didn’t stop at that. They returned two weeks later. Tunisian state security officers cuffed me and an American security officer asked me about my role in ALSAHAB (Al-Qaeda’s media agent). He also questioned me about the ALIKHLAS website and Alansar online forum. They gave me two documents to pick from. The first is my death certificate and the second is my release certificate. They also threatened me to hurt my brother.”

On the day that Bettibi’s desperate appeal surfaced on the Internet, the CIA declassified nearly 700 pages of secret records detailing its illegal activities during the cold war. They are now published on the CIA’s own website. They include a collection called the “family jewels”. Buried in these internal documents is clear evidence that CIA Director Allen Dulles personally approved the agency’s plot to assassinate Castro in 1960 and 1961.

Although the documents are publicly available on the CIA’s website, it has chosen to keep scores of pages partly or totally blacked out. Although the CIA is legally forbidden to spy within the USA, Richard Ober, head of the Special Operations Group and deputy to James Jesus Angleton, former chief of counterintelligence, directed Operation CHAOS, which spied on racial, anti-war and other protest groups inside the United States. Many sections relating to Ober remain blacked out. Inside and outside the US, the CIA continues to operate in close association with secret spy agencies in the UK and elsewhere. Let us take note.

By Corinna Lotz, AWTW secretary

Rendition: lies and their liars

Who would you rather believe when it comes to "extraordinary rendition" – the British government and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) or the respected human rights body, the Council of Europe (CoE)? New Labour’s denial that British airports were used by the CIA for refuelling en route to torture camps is worthless. ACPO’s endorsement only shows that the police are lying too on behalf of their paymasters. The ACPO statement has been described as "miraculous" in its timing, for it appeared just as a CoE report was published showing how the CIA ran torture prisons in Poland and Romania after 9/11, with Britain providing support by allowing the agency’s planes to land at military and civilian airports. ACPO’s spin on behalf of New Labour is flatly contradicted by recent events. On 2 June a plane repeatedly linked to CIA torture flights was spotted at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk. Watching aviation experts said the aircraft, piloted by crew clad in desert fatigues, was immediately surrounded on the runway by armed American guards. Its registration number identifies it as a plane which the European Parliament says has been involved in "ghost flights" to smuggle terrorist suspects to torture camps around the world. The American Federal Aviation Authority lists the plane as being operated by two companies, Aviation World Wide Services and a sister company, Presidential Airways. These are shell companies operating as subsidiaries of Blackwater USA, "an important contractor for the CIA and the US military", according to the European Parliament. A recent book on Blackwater by American author Jeremy Scahill, described the company as the world's "most secretive and powerful mercenary firm". It was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a fundamentalist Christian millionaire.

The CoE dossier, compiled by Swiss senator Dick Marty, said the US had used Britain's help to establish a "global spider's web" of jails and airports to pursue a war on terror without rules. So-called US "high-value" detainees (HVD) were held in secret CIA detention centres in Poland and Romania between 2002 and 2005. It describes in detail the scope and functioning of the US’s HVD programme, which it says was set up by the CIA "with the co-operation of official European partners belonging to government services". A secret agreement between the US and NATO allies in October 2001 provided the framework for the CIA to do its dirty business in Europe. The programme "has given rise to repeated serious breaches of human rights", the report by the CoE’s parliamentary committee declared, including the torture of detainees. The report said that only Bosnia and Herzegovina and Canada, a Council of Europe observer state, had fully acknowledged their responsibilities with regard to the unlawful transfers of detainees. Marty said: "The fight against terrorism must not serve as an excuse for systematic recourse to illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. I hold this view not only because methods of this nature conflict with the constitutional order of all civilised countries and are ethically unacceptable, but also because they are not effective from the perspective of a genuine long-term response to terrorism." His report, which is worth reading in full, contrasts with the statement from the British Foreign Office, which said: "We have been through the records, and there is no evidence of detainees being rendered through the UK since 1997." Who would you rather believe?

Paul Feldman, communications editor