Author: Idrees Ahmad

I am a Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Stirling and a former research fellow at the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies. I am the author of The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). I write for The Observer, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, Dissent, The National, VICE News, Huffington Post, In These Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), Adbusters, Guernica, London Review of Books (Blog), The New Arab, Bella Caledonia, Asia Times, IPS News, Medium, Political Insight, The Drouth, Canadian Dimension, Tanqeed, Variant, etc. I have appeared as an on-air analyst on Al Jazeera, the BBC, TRT World, RAI TV, Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon, Alternative Radio with David Barsamian and several Pacifica Radio channels.

A dick named Cox

What do you call someone who in 2009 believes that ‘Blair must have believed that WMD existed, since even the peace lobby did…[s]eeking to protect oil supplies wouldn’t have been an entirely ignoble concern…he might honestly have thought this would be in our own best interests. Alastair Campbell …could still have believed in the policy he was enforcing’ and thinks In the Loop is a bad film because it ‘excludes the part played by principle’?

There is much that one could criticize about the Armando Iannucci film In the Loop. That it couldn’t be as credulous as the tools in the New Labour press is not one of them. It is a travesty the British press should allow bovine oafs like David Cox to defile their pages.

Chávez creates a new bestseller

Chavez gives a book to Obama during the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain
Hugo Chavez gives Barack Obama a copy of Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America) by Eduardo Galeano during a meeting at the Summit of the Americas. Photograph: Ho/Reuters

Chávez creates overnight bestseller with book gift to Obama. I was wondering which book it was that Chavez passed on to Obama at the summit of the Americas. He chose well: it was Eduardo Galeano’s classic The Open Veins of Latin America. ‘Sales surge for book about history of Latin America’s exploitation after exchange at summit of Americas’ reports Andrew Clark in the Guardian.

A 36-year-old historical tract attacking the imperialist exploitation of Latin America has become an improbable overnight bestseller after the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávezabruptly presented a copy to Barack Obama.

During a session of the summit of the Americas in Trinidad at the weekend, Chávez strode up to Obama, patted him on the shoulder and, with a friendly handshake, gave him a paperback copy of Eduardo Galeano’s 1973 work, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

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Obama reprieve for CIA illegal

U.N. rapporteur on torture is challenging Barack Obama’s decision to grant CIA torturers a reprieve.

VIENNA (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA interrogators who used waterboarding on terrorism suspects amounts to a breach of international law, the U.N. rapporteur on torture said.

“The United States, like all other states that are part of the U.N. convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court,” U.N. special rapporteur Manfred Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

Nowak did not think Obama would go as far as to seek an amnesty law for affected CIA personnel and therefore U.S. courts could still try torture suspects, he said on Saturday.

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Taliban v. Taliban

India in Afghanistan. Graham Usher writes that ‘peace in Afghanistan rests on peace between India and Pakistan. The road out of Kabul goes through Kashmir.’

Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India.

In the Bajaur tribal area, for example, the army is fighting an insurgency led by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of one of Pakistan’s three Taliban factions, but it’s not because he is a friend of al-Qaida. What makes him a threat, in the eyes of Pakistan’s army, is that he is believed to be responsible for scores of suicide attacks inside Pakistan (including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto). He is also thought to have recruited hundreds of Afghan fighters, among them ‘agents’ from the Afghan and Indian intelligence services – ‘Pakistan’s enemies’, in the words of a senior officer.

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America needs a witch-hunt

The problem with a lot of British journalists who report from the US is that their analysis is inevitably hampered by their historical ignorance. In such circumstances conventional wisdom becomes a convenient refuge. It is easily available, and it can always be defended through references to years of accumulated nonsense. So here we have Rupert Cornwell of the Independent warning that ‘America doesn’t need a witch-hunt‘. To support his view he recycles one of Washington’s most discredited myths.

A month after taking office in August 1974, President Gerald Ford issued a full pardon to his predecessor Richard Nixon for his crimes in the Watergate affair. The public fury that followed probably cost him the 1976 election. Today, however, few historians doubt that Ford was right to spare the country further instalments of what he called “an American tragedy”.

This is bullshit perpetuated by Washington pundits. The pardon set a precedent for future abuses, and promoted the culture of impunity of which the present scandal is merely a symptom. The consequences of the pardon, as Keith Olbermann points out below, are very much to blame for the new ‘American tragedy’ (It is never a tragedy for those on the receiving end of course).

Nightmares made law

‘Obama is right not to target CIA interrogators. The torture memos show where blame truly lies,’ Philippe Sands.

The four secret US department of justice opinions released this week are jaw-dropping in their detail. They reveal how far the Bush administration was prepared to go in sanctioning interrogation techniques that plainly amount to torture.

The long-awaited publication of the August 2002 memo, signed by Jay Bybee but largely written by John Yoo, authorises 10 previously unlawful interrogation techniques. These include slapping, stress position and sleep deprivation, right up to waterboarding. It is doubtful a more shocking legal opinion has ever been written. It even purports to analyse if incarcerating a detainee in a small box with an insect for company would amount to mental torture (it depends what you tell him about its sting).

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Bush’s willing torturers

‘The newly-published Bush administration memos show a chilling, Orwellian abuse of language to justify torture,’ writes David Cole.

“Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing.” So Dennis Blair, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, stated as he sought to minimize the significance of four previously secret Justice Department memos that employed tortured legal reasoning to authorise CIA agents to use cruel and abusive tactics to interrogate suspects inside secret prisons.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” So begins George Orwell’s classic novel of the security state, 1984. It seems unlikely that Blair intended the allusion. Maybe every incoming US director of national intelligence is required to read 1984, and the opening line just stuck with him. But the reference could not have been more appropriate. The four Justice Department memos, spanning 124 pages of dense legal analysis and cold clinical descriptions of sustained, systematic abuse of human beings, do precisely what Orwell foretold: twist the English language in order to approve the unthinkable.

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Torture Memos Released

The Obama administration has released the four torture memos in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information request today. The redactions are not as extensive as initially thought. All the memos are available here. See the characteristically brilliant commentary by Glenn Greenwald below and Democracy Now’s interview with Greenwald and Justice Department whistleblower Thomas Tamm.

Obama to release OLC torture memos; promises no prosecutions for CIA officials

(updated below – Update II)

In a just-released statement, Barack Obama announced that — in response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit — he has ordered four key Bush-era torture memos released, and the Associated Press, citing anonymous Obama sources, is reporting that “there is very little redaction, or blacking out, of detail in the memos.”  Marc Ambinder is reporting that only the names of the CIA agents involved will be redacted; everything else will be disclosed.  Simultaneously, and certainly with the intend to placate angry intelligence officials, Attorney General Eric Holder has “informed CIA officials [though not necessarily Bush officials] who used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects that they will not be prosecuted,” and Obama announced the same thing in his statement.

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The cult of irrelevance

Steve Walt reflects on the chasm between the worlds of IR theory and policy.

A year or so ago, I read a news story where a well-known IR scholar explained the silence of many academics about the Iraq war by saying that “I don’t think all the academics in the world could have had much impact on American public opinion…I don’t think academics matter.”

Even if true in this particular case, this is a self-fulfilling world-view. If you basically believe that what scholars write and say doesn’t really matter for major national policy decisions, you’re unlikely to write or say anything that might actually shape those decisions. And for many academics, that’s ok with them.

As Laura Rozen noted earlier this week, my colleague Joseph Nye offered a candid and critical assessment of the growing gap between academia and the policy world in a Washington Post column on Monday. Joe’s own career demonstrates that it is still possible combine serious scholarship, government service, academic leadership, and public commentary, but his warnings that this combination is becoming rarer is almost certainly correct.  Michael Desch makes some related points in a recent article in Notre Dame Magazine, noting that the policy world is increasingly indifferent (or hostile) to academic advice. Together, the portrait they paint is more than a little disturbing.

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