Category: Global War on Terror

The Iraq war has been a monstrous crime

‘Politicians crave a whitewash – but Britain must hold a fully open public inquiry into the bloodbath it helped to create’, writes Seumas Milne.

It’s hardly surprising that those responsible for the human and social catastrophe unleashed by the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, on both sides of the Atlantic, should be desperate to rewrite its history – or try to salvage the shattered reputation of those armies that carried it out. In Britain, as the bulk of its troops withdraw after a campaign that has already lasted longer than the second world war, that propaganda offensive has now reached fever pitch.

Gordon Brown claimed yesterday that the wreckage of blood-drenched Iraq was a “success story”. The defence secretary John Hutton insisted Britain should be proud of its “legacy” in the devastated cities of the south. Hilary Benn, the environment secretary boasted of his support for the original aggression on BBC’s Question Time yesterday, declaring that ” we leave Iraq a better place” – a line repeated word for word by the Sun today and echoed across much of the media.

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Eric Margolis on Pakistan and Afghanistan

Eric Margolis is one of the world’s leading experts on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is particularly insightful in this interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio.

Eric Margolis, author of American Raj: Liberation or Domination, discusses the causes of instability in Pakistan, the unrealistic expectations the U.S. places on its puppet governments, the Taliban’s inability to fill the Pakistan power vacuum and why the U.S. can’t resist the lure of imperialism.

MP3 here. (23:59)

Eric Margolis is a regular columnist with the Quebecor Media Company and a contributor to The Huffington Post. He is the author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet.

Farewell, the American Century

Andrew J. Bacevich Rewriting the Past by Adding In What’s Been Left Out. (via TomDispatch)

In a recent column, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote, “What Henry Luce called ‘the American Century’ is over.” Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce’s pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.

When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of Life, his essay, “The American Century,” hit the newsstands at a moment when the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.

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Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11

A US major reveals the inside story of military interrogation in Iraq in this report by Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism

The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.

“The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology,” says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

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The liberal supremacists

‘Whether they like it or not, Dawkins, Amis, Hitchens and company have become weapons in the war on terror,’ writes Terry Eagleton, bane of the New Atheists. Don’t miss his delightfully scathing debunking of Dawkins here.

One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies. This, surely, is the acid test of any liberal creed. Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant. A community of the broad-minded is a pleasant place, but requires no great moral effort. The key issue is how the liberal state copes with those who reject its ideological framework. It is fashionable today to speak of being open to the “Other”. But what if the Other detests your openness as much as it does your lapdancing clubs?

There is no quarrel about how to treat those whose scorn for liberal values takes the form of blowing the legs off small children. They need to be locked up. But socialists as well as Islamists reject the liberal state, so what is to be done about them? Are they to be indulged only until they successfully challenge the state, at which point they too will find themselves behind bars with the zealots of al-Qaida?

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Police and PM in dock over arrest of terrorist suspects

Surprise, surprise! The British state cried wolf again. ‘Case against Muslim men amounted to one email and handful of telephone conversations’, report By Jonathan Brown, Robert Verkaik and Kim Sengupta. Also check out this brilliant indictment of the ‘war on terror’ by Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The case against 12 Muslim men involved in what Gordon Brown described as a “major terrorist plot” amounted to one email and a handful of ambiguous telephone conversations, it emerged last night after all the men were released without charge.

Eleven Pakistani students and one British man were freed after extensive searches of 14 addresses in North-west England failed to locate evidence of terrorist activity, according to security sources. Police did not find any explosives, firearms, target lists, documents or any material which could have been used to carry out an attack. Yesterday, the Government’s own reviewer of terrorism legislation said he would investigate the case.

The Home Office said it would deport the 11 Pakistani men, who are aged 22 to 38 and were in Britain on student visas, because the Government believed they represented a threat to national security.

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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).