Archive for June, 2009

WASHINGTON, Apr 20 (IPS) – A U.S. government investigation of Israeli spying caught a prominent Democratic congresswoman discussing what is alleged to be a “quid pro quo” deal involving the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Washington’s powerful hawkish pro-Israel lobby.

Representative Jane Harman of California was recorded in 2005 on a National Security Administration (NSA) wiretap promising a suspected Israeli agent that she would intervene on behalf of two AIPAC staffers accused of passing classified information to the Israeli government, and her interlocutor responded by promising to help get Harman appointed to a top congressional intelligence post, according to an article published Sunday by Congressional Quarterly (CQ).

Perhaps even more notably, then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales later halted an FBI investigation of Harman’s actions because of Harman’s political value as a defender of the George W. Bush administration’s much-criticised warrantless wiretapping programme, the CQ report states.

The Harman scandal’s political repercussions appear to be growing, and it sits at the intersection of several controversial issues – among them, the influence of the “Israel lobby” on Capitol Hill, the complicity of top Democrats in Bush-era abuses, and the politicisation of judicial proceedings under the Bush administration.

Harman has a reputation as one of the Democratic Party’s foremost hawks, both on Israel-Palestine and on issues related to the “global war on terror”. She has long enjoyed a close relationship with AIPAC, and is scheduled to speak at the group’s annual conference in May.

Allegations of a quid pro quo arrangement involving Harman and AIPAC are nothing new; Time magazine reported in 2006 that the FBI and Justice Department were investigating whether such a deal took place.

What was new in Sunday’s CQ piece, written by reporter Jeff Stein on the basis of conversations with multiple senior national security officials speaking anonymously, were the claims that the deal had been recorded by the NSA wiretap and that attorney general Gonzales had squelched the investigation of Harman for political reasons.

In an online discussion Monday, Stein stated the wiretap was court-approved and did not target Harman; rather, it was directed at the suspected Israeli agent with whom she was speaking.

Harman and her interlocutor were discussing the impending trial of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, two senior AIPAC staffers who had been fired and charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for passing classified information to the Israeli government.

(Rosen’s and Weissman’s trial is scheduled to start this summer; Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon staffer who passed them the classified information, pled guilty to conspiracy in 2006 and was sentenced to over 12 years in prison.)

Harman was recorded saying that she would be willing to “waddle into” the AIPAC case to try to get the Justice Department to reduce its charges against Rosen and Weissman. In return, the suspected Israeli agent promised to help lobby Nancy Pelosi, at the time the House minority leader and now its speaker, to convince Pelosi to appoint Harman as chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Harman at the time was serving as the Democratic ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, but had a testy relationship with Pelosi; she was ultimately passed up for the committee chair in 2006 in favour of Representative Silvestre Reyes.

The identity of Harman’s interlocutor is unknown, although most analysts are assuming that he or she had significant ties to AIPAC, which has traditionally been dominant in lobbying members of congress on matters pertaining to Israel.

Haim Saban, a prominent Israeli-American businessman, has been frequently mentioned in the “blogosphere” as a possible suspect, but this identification seems primarily to have been based on the fact that Saban’s name was mentioned in the 2006 Time magazine piece about Harman. So far no solid evidence has emerged to link him to the incident.

One anonymous source told the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder that Harman’s interlocutor was a U.S. citizen.

AIPAC denied having participated in any wrongdoing in the Harman scandal. “AIPAC would never engage in a quid pro quo related to a federal investigation or any other federal matter,” spokesman Patrick Dorton said. “That is absurd.”

Harman’s office also released a statement denying any wrongdoing.

“The CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material to manufacture a ‘scoop’ out of widely known and unremarkable facts,” the statement said.

“If there is anything about this story that should arouse concern, it is that the Bush Administration may have been engaged in electronic surveillance of members of the congressional Intelligence Committees.”

Harman’s concern about the Bush administration’s surveillance policies is somewhat ironic, given that she was previously the strongest defender of the administration’s warrantless wiretapping programme among congressional Democrats – and that she appears to have avoided a federal investigation of her AIPAC ties only as a result of her permissive stance on wiretapping.

Harman had previously helped convince the New York Times not to report on the programme, and after the newspaper finally decided to run the story, she blasted its editors for compromising U.S. national security.

Due to Harman’s value in providing bipartisan cover for the administration’s policies, Gonzales intervened with CIA director Porter Goss to derail a pending FBI investigation of her, including a court-approved wiretap.

(The wiretap targeting the suspected Israeli agent that captured Harman’s conversation had been approved by the special court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and thus was not part of the NSA warrantless wiretapping programme.)

According to Stein’s sources, then, the end of the FBI investigation of Harman was not due to “lack of evidence”, as her defenders publicly claimed, but rather due to political considerations by the Bush administration.

The Harman scandal comes at an especially unwelcome time for AIPAC. The organisation has faced mounting criticism in recent years on charges that it – along with other, similarly right-leaning groups within the “Israel lobby” – have for years skewed Washington’s Middle East policy in a hawkish direction and stifled open discussion of Israel-Palestine issues.

These concerns led to the formation last year of a new pro-Israel lobbying group, J Street, which aims to give voice to what it characterises as the more dovish views held by most U.S. Jews.

Now, with its annual conference approaching, AIPAC finds itself once again in the spotlight, linked to a story that its critics are taking as a corroboration of many of the harshest claims made against it.

Judge’s ruling is forcing president to confront issue of Afghan prison

Should detainees the United States has shipped to the Bagram air base in Afghanistan have the same constitutional right to challenge their detention in court that prisoners at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba have been given?

President Barack Obama didn’t answer that question in a May 21 speech outlining his policy for dealing with alleged terrorists. In fact, Obama didn’t mention Bagram at all.

Yet human rights lawyers say Bagram will play a critical role in shaping the Obama administration’s detainee policy.

Obama has promised to close the Guantanamo prison by Jan. 22 of next year, but the Bagram prison continues to house alleged terrorists captured by the United States in Pakistan and other nations.

As a candidate for president, Obama praised a Supreme Court ruling last June that granted prisoners at Guantanamo habeas corpus rights to challenge their detention. He applauded Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush as “a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo.”

Do Guantanamo rules reach to Bagram?

But an April 2 decision by U.S. District Judge John Bates that applied the Boumediene ruling to some Bagram prisoners is forcing Obama to confront the question of whether he’s presiding over his own “legal black hole” at the prison in Afghanistan.

Obama team appeals on Bagram

The Obama administration said it would appeal a federal judge’s ruling that allows some prisoners at the Bagram base in Afghanistan to challenge their imprisonment in court. Why is this a big deal?

The Obama administration is challenging this ruling in the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., arguing that Bates’ ruling would for the first time in American history extend habeas corpus rights to non-Americans in a theater of war in a foreign territory.

The Bagram site, they contend, is not like Guantanamo because the United States has become de facto ruler of the Cuban base after maintaining control of it since 1903.

But Bates ruled that some of those held at Bagram who were captured outside Afghanistan “are virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene,” describing them as “non-citizens who were… apprehended in foreign lands far from the United States and brought to yet another country for detention.”

“The constitutional issues presented are consequential and fundamental: at stake are separation of powers considerations, the president’s authority to wage war abroad free from judicial scrutiny, and the constitutional rights of certain aliens detained abroad indefinitely by the United States,” Bates wrote in a separate ruling this week that cleared the way for the appeal.

His original ruling – which is on hold pending the appeal – gave habeas rights to three men at Bagram, all of whom are being held as “illegal enemy combatants”:

Fadi al Maqaleh, a Yemeni who was taken into U.S. custody in 2003 (Obama administration lawyers say he was captured in Afghanistan; al Maqaleh says his capture occurred outside Afghanistan).

Amin al Bakri, a Yemeni, captured by U.S. forces in Thailand in 2002.

Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian who was captured in Pakistan in 2002.

If upheld by the appeals court and Supreme Court, the Bates ruling would open the way to appeals by others at Bagram, though it is not clear how many detainees were moved to the prison after being apprehended outside the country.

Criticism of Obama from abroad

Bates’ ruling has fueled criticism of the Obama administration, in the United States and abroad.

The Times of London said in a May 27 signed editorial that Bagram is “the grossly underreported story” of “a U.S.-run jail that Mr. Obama does not want the world to focus on. … It is Bagram, not Guantanamo, that should trouble the world’s conscience.”

Times writer Tim Reid said that at Bagram “more than 600 prisoners, many held for years, and all without charges and indefinitely are packed into conditions far worse than Guantanamo.”

Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a legal advocacy group which is representing al Maqaleh and al Bakri, agreed that Obama is aiming to deflect attention from the Afghan prison.

“I think the administration is not talking about Bagram because it is an embarrassing part of their detention policy,” she said.

Obama “has adopted the Bush administration policy which allows the president to maintain a completely lawless enclave any place in the world besides the U.S. and Guantanamo Bay. They’d like the American public to believe they have solved the problem by declaring they are going to close Guantanamo.”

The White House did not respond to msnbc.com’s requests for comment on the Bagram issue.

Decision limited to Guantanamo?

But one critic of the Supreme Court’s decision on Guantanamo, Brookings Institution legal expert Benjamin Wittes, warned last year that the ruling would lead to judges extending habeas rights to military prisoners held by the United States around the globe.

“I didn’t think you could confine it to Guantanamo,” he told msnbc.com. “A lot of people said then that I was being alarmist; I think I was being realistic.”

Other legal experts said Obama’s decision to leave Bagram out of his May 21 speech won’t remove his need to confront the legal problems posed by the site.

“It’s unfortunate, because Bagram is certainly going to be the focus of concerns for the administration” in dealing with detainee policy from now on, said Gabor Rona, the International Legal Director of the advocacy group Human Rights First.

Noting that a task force appointed by Obama and headed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder is due to report its proposals for a new detainee policy next month, Rona said, “Whatever recommendations it makes are going to be driven by the present state of affairs at Bagram.”

Gathering evidence in a theater of war

Bagram is different from Guantanamo in one important respect: It’s in an active theater of war.

But the difficulties in gathering evidence and taking depositions “certainly are not insurmountable,” Bates said in his decision. (Bates was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush in 2001.)

But Justice Department lawyers argue that responding to habeas petitions from Bagram detainees would “divert the military’s attention and resources at a critical time for operations in Afghanistan.”

Moreover, they contend, Bates’ ruling “encroaches on military judgments about where to detain an individual captured during an ongoing war.”

Under the separation of powers doctrine, they argue, the commander in chief and his generals need broad powers to conduct military operations. Allowing habeas litigation under these circumstances would risk harming the president’s “ability to succeed in armed conflict and to protect United States’ forces.”

But law professor Kal Raustiala, the director of UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations, said Bates’ ruling was narrow enough that it would not significantly disrupt military operations.

“Judge Bates ruled on only a handful of individuals, all of whom were brought to Bagram from elsewhere,” he said. “Limited to these cases, the diversion is not that great.”

He said the crucial point is that Bates “is trying to take away the incentive to bring outsiders (those captured outside Afghanistan) to Bagram. He wants to avoid the problem posed by Guantanamo – that the government is incentivized to move individuals there to avoid habeas and other rights.”

If Bagram or other foreign bases are beyond the reach of habeas corpus, “it creates a mechanism for executive tyranny in a world in which it is easy to fly someone in there on a suspicion,” said Raustiala.

The Pakistan problem

With Obama accelerating military operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan – seeing the two as “AfPak,” one unified strategic region – Justice Department lawyers emphasized the problem that Pakistan problem in motions filed with Judge Bates.

Granting habeas rights to those held at Bagram would give “the enemies of the United States an incentive to conduct operations from Pakistan, using it as a safe haven and using the U.S. court system as a tactical weapon,” they said, sketching a scenario in which lawyers would tie up the military in protracted proceedings to determine where and under what circumstances each particular prisoner at Bagram was captured.

“This is the hardest issue for the courts,” observed Raustiala. Obama “wants to be able to capture individuals in Pakistan and bring those individuals to Bagram, and there may be much more of this kind of thing in the next months. And it is hard to articulate a principle that would allow that – and yet be consistent with Bates’s decision.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31046933/

Though we have been living in an abnormal environment since our beginning as a nation 62 years ago, never before were we as aware of ourselves as we are today.
What we should have done or not is clear to us today, and we have certainly started doing different things.

Yet, the impressions of past are not allowing some of us to accept the change. Almost all politico-religious parties one way or the other are stressing on halting the military operation. They want the government to start dialogue with the militants again. The other job of the government that has earned it opposition is the trade agreement with Afghanistan. Many writers and analysts are warning the government against the bad outcome that would result if the trade agreement includes India.

The military operation was the last instrument left with the government after the Swat agreement failed to materialize due to the rigidity shown by the local Taliban on everything agreed upon. They wanted to implement their own Shariah through their own Qazis, and administration. They had also marched into the adjoining areas after ‘conquering’ Swat. Besides, they had started speaking with utmost contempt against the constitution and democracy. If this was allowed to take place, it would have meant Talibanization of Pakistan within months. All this was enough to shake not only Pakistan but the entire world.

The capture of Jemaah Islamiyah, Mantiqi 1 leader of Singapore, Mas Selamat, a month ago in Skudai, Johor Bahru has been a success of the intelligence and information sharing among Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. Mas Selamat succeeded Ibrahim Maidin who formed the Singapore cell in 1988 but was apprehended in 2003 by the Thai authorities.

Mantiqi 1 or M1 is based in Malaysia and covers Malaysia, Singapore, and Southern Thailand. M1 was initially led by Riduan Isamudin and later became JI’s head of operations, also known as “Hambali”he was captured in July of 2003 in Thailand. Upon his capture by the authorities, he was subsequently replaced by Muklas who also in December of 2002 was captured by the Indonesian authorities and executed for the 2002 Bali Bombings. Currently M1 is headed by Nordin Top, a Malaysian born and still at large and a leading “bomb expert” for JI.

The Singapore JI leadership is subordinate to the Johor JI leadership.

Effects of ongoing military operations in Malakand Division are being felt all over the country in the form of human displacement and bomb attacks. While Balochistan is festering, Karachi has also become restive because of motivated clashes between MQM activists and Pakhtun settlers. During the bout in April, out of 35 killed, only two belonged to MQM.

ANP wanted to refresh memories of people of Karachi about massacre of its 38 political activists allegedly at the hands of MQM goons on the fateful day of 12 May 2007 by observing it a black day. The MQM too decided to take out rallies in reaction. By making the two antagonist parties’ call off their rallies to flex their muscles, an extremely explosive situation was averted but situation is still tense and fraught with danger. Hostility of the two parties has not subsided. The Pakhtuns in Balochistan carried out a shutter down strike in protest against killing of fellow Pakhtuns in Karachi. MQM acclaimed the army for launching operations against the Taliban in Malakand Division. It wants another operation in Karachi against Pakhtuns while the ANP wants MQM to be sorted out.

Karachi is under tight control of MQM which doesn’t allow any person form other province or tribal belt to step into its domain without its approval. For the last one year, lot of hullabaloo is being made that militants fleeing from FATA and Frontier Province are pouring into the port city who would disturb the security situation. This fear has prompted the MQM to raise the bogey of Talibanisation of Karachi. Even internally displaced persons (IDPs) have been disallowed under the notion that its demographic monopoly and political control would get compromised when fresh induction would add up to the strength of Pashtun settlers in Karachi. Families displaced from Malakand Division because of army action have been stopped at junction point of Punjab and Sindh at Kashmore by Sindh government under extreme pressure of Sindh nationalist parties and MQM. IDPs have been asked to register before entering Sindh and to remain confined to camps established in wilderness. Request of uprooted people to stay with their relatives and friends in Karachi is not being heeded to which has caused deep resentment among the Pashtun community.

This cold-hearted stance has been condemned by ANP, Jamaat Islami, Tehrik Insaf as well as common people of Sindh, Punjab and Pashtun belt of Balochistan saying that fellow citizens have become refugees in their own country. Acts of violence and arson erupted in various parts of Karachi on 23 May in which dozens of vehicles belonging to Pashtuns were torched by unknown miscreants and a woman burnt alive. Strikes were observed in interior Sindh to protest entry of IDPs, duly supported by MQM. Relations of ANP and MQM which are coalition partners with PPP in the centre and in Sindh have become strained and they are now at loggerheads. Refusal of entry to IDPs by Sindh government has antagonized the ANP and it has threatened to quit its coalition with PPP; and so had MQM.