by David Steven | Jun 19, 2008 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
Day by day, it seems more likely that senior members of the Bush administration will be prosecuted for war crimes.
There’s a new report out on medical evidence of US torture. Antonio Taguba, the Major-General who investigated Abu Ghraib and was then forced to retire, wrote the preface:
This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individuals’ lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.
Taguba continues:
After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.
These are some of the practices documented in the report:
- Suspensions and other stress positions;
- Routine isolation;
- Sleep deprivation combined with sensory bombardment and temperature extremes;
- Sexual humiliation and forced nakedness;
- Sodomy;
- Beatings;
- Denial of medical care;
- Electric shock;
- Involuntary medication; and
- Threats to their lives and families.
Meanwhile, evidence is slowly mounting to show that torture was authorised at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Mark Benjamin has a useful time line. Under questioning, senior officials are sounding increasingly desperate:
William “Jim” Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee.
Did he ask a subordinate to get information about harsh questioning techniques?
“My memory is not perfect.”
Did he see a memo about the effects of these techniques?
“I don’t specifically remember when I saw this.”
Did he remember doing something with the information he got?
“I don’t remember doing something with this information.”
When did he discuss these methods with other Bush administration officials?
“I don’t know precisely when, and I cannot discuss it further without getting into classified information.”
People are going to go to jail for this – and they’ll be much more senior than the small fry currently doing time. How high will the investigation go? Higher than most commentators probably think…
by David Steven | Jun 19, 2008 | Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America
Remember Curveball? The intelligence ‘source’ who supplied ‘virtually all of the [US] Intelligence Community’s information on Iraq’s alleged mobile biological programs.’
As a refresh, here’s what the US Presidential Commission on intelligence screw-ups made of the episode:
One of the most painful errors… concerned Iraq’s biological weapons. Virtually all of the weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed “Curveball,” who was a fabricator. We discuss at length how Curveball came to play so prominent a role in the Intelligence Community’s biological weapons assessments. It is, at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source’s reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed; and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball’s flaws in the weeks before war.
Well Curveball – real name Rafid Ahmed Alwan – has just given his first media interview and it turns out that he’s even more of a sad sap than we realised. He’s remained in Germany, from where he is denying everything:
I never said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, never in my whole life. I challenge anyone in the world to get a piece of paper from me, anything with my signature, that proves I said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
But he seems to have told some fairly obvious lies in his fifty or so meetings with German intelligence (meetings that were used in 100 or more US intelligence reports):
He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif’s son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind.
When a Western intelligence team interviewed Latif outside Iraq in early 2002, a year before the war, he warned that Alwan had been fired for falsifying invoices at work. Latif also denied that anyone produced biological weapons at the plant where he worked with Alwan.
“They thought I was lying,” Latif, who now lives in Oman, said in an interview. “But I was telling the truth. It upset me very much
A serial fraud, who had been fired from numerous jobs, Alwan fled Iraq after a warrant was issued for his arrest for the theft of cameras from his employer. But German intelligence thought he was a good source because he “was understated…the opposite of a braggart, and that was impressive.”
Colleagues at Burger King (purveyor of the Whopper) where Alwan flipped burgers were less easily fooled:
In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein’s regime.
They couldn’t decide if he was dangerous or crazy.
“During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad,” said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. “But he always lied. We never believed anything he said.”
Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be “a big deal” in Iraq. “How could America believe such a person?”
My thoughts exactly.
by Richard Gowan | Jun 19, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks, North America, Off topic
Here’s a really very moving campaign ad for Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, or “Big John”. It’s almost enough to make me forgive Clooney’s “Waging Peace” video, but not quite.
As I got this from Gawker (“Insane Political Ad Must Be a Joke”) and Gawker pointed out that it was already available from Wonkette and lots of other places, U.S. readers may well have seen it already. But I suspect that, in spite the world-size-reducing powers of the web, readers further afield may have missed it. Enjoy!
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vcB7uCqdFk]
by Alex Evans | Jun 19, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America
Exciting news: the DC-based Young Professionals in Foreign Policy network is organising a silent auction for charity, in which you can buy yourself a hot foreign policy lunch date.
Some of the names are pretty good. I’d be up for soup and a sandwich with Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson, or with Washington Note blogger Steven Clemons. And who wouldn’t jump at the chance to grab a salad with former White House chief of staff John Podesta? I’d even – at a pinch – consider bidding for the chance to hang out with former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, if only to ask him about the opening paragraph of his biog:
“During his first four years as Secretary, America achieved the lowest vehicle fatality rate ever recorded… The Secretary has [also] overseen the safest three-year period in aviation history.”
Er, and 9/11 fits in where to this rosy account?
But all of this is before we get to the main course. For the most notable thing about YPFP’s 14 strong list is the preponderance of neo-cons. They’re all here! You can head out for dim sum with Danielle Pletka, the American Enterprise Institute’s VP for foreign policy. You can have pasta with Paul Wolfowitz. You could grill Richard Perle over a rib-eye.
Or – perhaps most attractively of all – you could sign up for lunch with former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the Honourable Douglas J Feith.
I know, I know – I’m thinking it too. And so, dear readers, a proposal. In the red corner: the man General Tommy Franks called “the stupidest fucking guy on the planet”. In the blue corner, if he’s willing to accept this demanding mission: GD’s acerbic defence guru Richard Gowan – tooled up with a tape recorder, a notebook, and enough cash for to keep the zinfandel flowing for as long as it takes.
I will chip in a crisp tenner to a Global Dashboard fighting fund to bring this exquisite vision one step closer to reality. Who’s with me? The auction’s tomorrow, so we need to be a bit quicker than the average multi-donor pledging conference if we’re to succeed…
by Alex Evans | Jun 19, 2008 | Africa, Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Global system
Not much respite in prospect on food export restrictions, if today’s FT is anything to go by. Vietnam, the world’s second largest exporter of rice, has imposed a minimum price of $800 a tonne on rice exports (the price last year was $300 – ouch). Meanwhile, Argentina has just passed a tariff bill which “is not likely to lead to an immediate resumption of grain exports in the world’s third-biggest soy producer, sixth-biggest wheat producer and second-biggest corn exporter, analysts say”.
These problems underline a bigger challenge lurking in the background: that while the world may have a rules-based global trading system built around the WTO, that system is built for totally different trading conditions to the ones that obtain today.
In essence, the WTO and its dispute resolution architecture are designed to help countries to work through squabbles about market access and dumping – the sort of scuffles you expect in a buyer’s market. Fine – except that today, we’re in a seller’s market, on food and energy alike, where the concerns that are really furrowing brows are over security of supply, not market access.
And as a range of current examples show, the one thing policymakers can’t do is just sit back and ‘leave it to the market’. On energy, there’s already increasing friction over strategic oil supplies in Africa, the Arabian Gulf and the South China Sea. On food, meanwhile, export restrictions have left many countries in serious difficulties – like the Philippines, which is trying to go self-sufficient in rice within three years (from being the world’s no. 1 importer today – good luck). Meanwhile, China, Saudi Arabia and other importers are engaged in a quiet but determined hunt for land to buy in third countries.
Over the long term, these pressures may increase dramatically. Demand for energy and food is forecast to grow by 50 per cent each by 2030, according to the IEA and the World Bank respectively. If supply growth fails to keep pace – as seems entirely possible, especially given that food and energy prices are increasingly interlinked (through fuel costs, fertiliser costs, and the arbitrage relationship created by biofuels) – then situations like these will in retrospect seem like no more than trailers for the main feature.
In that context, it would be helpful if our rules-based trading system had something – anything – to say on the subject of security of supply. Do major exporters of key strategic resources have responsibilities as well as rights in the international system? Or is it no more than the legitimate exercise of sovereignty if they suspend or restrict exports at a moment’s notice?
Big questions – but not ones that are the subject of searching debate among trade negotiators. Like Britain’s artillery guns in Singapore during World War Two, the world trade system’s defences are pointing the wrong way.
