Cheney, Libby 'sold out the world for an F-16 sale'

'They sold out the world for an F-16 sale'

04/30/2007 @ 11:25 am

Filed by Luke Ryland

Onetime CIA analyst alleges Cheney, Libby lied to Congress about Pakistani nukes

In the era of Ronald Reagan, intelligence officer Richard Barlow was an analyst for the CIA, monitoring Pakistan's nuclear program. In 1989, he moved over to the Pentagon, where he worked for then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. Barlow lost that job when he raised objections to his bosses about senior Pentagon officials allegedly lying to Congress concerning Pakistan’s emerging nuclear program.

In a series of interviews with RAW STORY conducted over several weeks, the onetime intelligence officer revealed new details about intelligence on Pakistan’s nuclear program—and efforts by the US to quash attempts to stop development. Barlow's story also casts light on recent efforts by the current administration to keep information from Congress on Iraq and other matters.

Pakistan gets the bomb

In 1975, Pakistani scientist AQ Khan “acquired” nuclear blueprints from his Dutch employer and was immediately put in charge of Pakistan's nuclear program. In 1988, Pakistan would detonate its first atomic bomb.

Former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers has said that the CIA was monitoring Khan from the beginning. He asserts that the US turned down offers to detain Khan in 1975 and 1986 because they wanted to “gain more information” about the scientist’s activities.

Intelligence information later showed that the US and its allies allowed Pakistan to clandestinely acquire most of the technology for its nuclear program from abroad, unwittingly facilitating the spread of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya over the past several decades.

When Richard Barlow joined the CIA in 1985 as a counter-proliferation intelligence officer with particular expertise on Pakistan, he quickly realized that Pakistan was continuing to develop its nuclear program, and that some of its clandestine and illegal procurement activity was occurring within the US.

It didn't take Barlow long to realize that US officials knew what Pakistan was doing. According to Barlow, individuals at the State Department later actively facilitated procurement, tipping off targets of sealed arrest warrants in undercover operations and illegally approving export licenses for restricted goods.

Naturally, this situation created problems.

In 1985—following the arrest of a Pakistani agent in the US who attempted to procure specialized switches for nuclear detonators—Congress took steps to prevent Pakistan from developing nuclear weapons, passing bills that would cut off economic and military aid to Pakistan if it were found to be involved in nuclear activities.

One amendment declared that all overt aid to Pakistan—which came to over $4 billion in 1986—must cease unless the President certified annually that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear device. Another prohibited aid to any “non-nuclear” nation found to be illegally exporting nuclear materials from the US.

Given Pakistan's proliferation activities, this meant the ongoing aid to Pakistan was illegal. However, President Reagan wanted military and economic aid to continue flowing to Pakistan to ensure its ongoing support of his covert war against the Russians in Afghanistan.

The countervailing view, held by many at the CIA, was that proliferation was an important threat in its own right and shouldn’t take a back seat to fighting communism. In addition, Barlow and others believed that Pakistan would continue to assist in the covert war against the Russians, regardless of sanctions against its nuclear program.

Barlow sparks a firestorm

In 1987, Barlow engineered the arrest of some of Khan’s agents in the US as part of an undercover operation. He says the arrests came with the full support and knowledge of the highest levels of the CIA and the Reagan administration.

The arrest sparked a firestorm. Proof of Pakistan's proliferation activities would trigger the provisions of the the so-called Solarz Amendment and put an end to Pakistani aid.

The amendment’s author, Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs Chairman Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-NY), called for a top-secret briefing by the CIA. Barlow was sent to represent the agency, armed with talking points.

Under orders from the CIA, Barlow told Solarz’ Subcommittee the truth: There were “scores” of illegal transactions that should have triggered the Solarz Amendment, and the Pakistanis involved—including a retired general—were agents of the government of Pakistan.

Pakistan, Barlow said, had been breaking US nuclear export laws regularly since 1985, and the responsible individuals in the US intelligence and law enforcement communities knew it. Having just approved a multi-billion dollar aid package, Solarz and others in Congress—including Senator Larry Pressler, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee—were outraged to learn about Pakistan's violations of their laws. Solarz was appalled that information had been hidden from Congress.

In contrast, those who had willfully misled Congress were horrified that Barlow had told the truth. They tried to undercut Barlow's testimony but to no avail. Barlow’s classified testimony was unimpeachable.

The pressure on Barlow continued

Barlow was a marked man. While those in his part of the CIA (the Directorate of Intelligence), the State Department non-proliferation staff, and the law enforcement agencies considered him a hero, those running the covert Afghan war—the Directorate of Operations, the former National Intelligence Officer for Proliferation who had been responsible for briefing Congress, and the State Department's regional office—tried to get him fired for engineering the arrest and spilling the beans.

Barlow, however, was soon vindicated. A US court convicted the Pakistani agents and President Reagan triggered the Solarz Amendment for the first and only time.

Immediately afterward, Reagan invoked a national security waiver provision in the law, nullifying the amendment. In the words of veteran intelligence reporter Seymour Hersh, "The President was telling Pakistan that it could have its money—and its bomb."

"These people were determined that nothing like this was ever going to happen ever again—no more arrests, no more truth to the Congress," Barlow recalls. "I had people giving me awards at the same time as other people were trying to fire me—it was unbelievable.”

“I was targeted by some in the Directorate of Operations; they made my life miserable,” he continues. “Nobody at the agency actually tried to destroy my life, but they did make my life miserable and damaged my career prospects.”

“I left of my own free will, relatively speaking,” he adds. “I could have stayed—but I wasn't going to put up with that shit. I was caught in the middle of a massive battle between the cold warriors and the counterproliferation forces in the CIA.”

“The cold warriors were a bunch of arrogant bastards,” he remarks.

F-16s or bust

In early 1989, after George H.W. Bush became president, Barlow joined the Pentagon’s Office of Non-Proliferation Policy—working under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Stephen Hadley, and then-Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Scooter Libby.

Barlow says he continued to be engaged in trying to arrest more Pakistani nuclear agents. He also claims there were other examples of officials lying to Congress about Pakistan's nuclear program in order to keep aid flowing, but now there was a significant difference: The Afghan war was over, so there was no Cold War “justification” for continuing to shovel money at Pakistan. This time, he believes, it was simply about profit.

"They sold out the world for an F-16 sale," Barlow says.

By then, Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons.

"They had nuclear weapons at the time, and we knew they did,” Barlow remarks. “The evidence was unbelievable. I can't go into it—but on a scale of 1 to 10, in terms of intelligence evidence, it was a 10 or 11. It doesn't get any better than that.”

Barlow asserts that in 1988 and 1989, Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush illegally certified that Pakistan was free of nuclear weapons in order to keep funds flowing.

In the late eighties, Pakistan, trying to outmuscle India by injecting nuclear and air power steroids into their arms program, was seeking to buy 60 new F-16s worth $1.6 billion.

F-16 manufacturer General Dynamics desperately wanted the sale.

Unfortunately for the firm, Rep. Solarz and others in Congress expected assurances that the planes couldn't be used to drop nuclear weapons.

This was problematic: American intelligence knew that Pakistan had already made the minor modifications to their existing fleet of F-16s so that they could carry, and drop, nuclear weapons.

In fact, US and foreign intelligence and news reports indicated that the Pakistanis had in fact modified their F-16’s for nuclear delivery and had been conducting training exercises where they practiced dropping nuclear weapons from the F-16s. Nonetheless, Barlow says, Pentagon officials lied to Congress under oath, saying that the planes couldn't be used for nuclear purposes without a radical overhaul well beyond the industrial capabilities of Pakistan.

Barlow says he then learned that Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Hughes had delivered testimony willfully falsified by officials at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He realized that Hughes had lied to Solarz' committee because earlier in 1989 he had prepared a comprehensive paper on this very issue for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

“All the top experts had looked at this question in detail for years, and it was a cold hard engineering question,” Barlow says. “There was no question about it—the jets could easily be made nuke-capable, and we knew that Pakistan had done just that."

Barlow says he tried again to inform his bosses that the congressional testimony was false. He was effectively fired two days later.

“They tried to destroy my life”

They've also continued retaliating against him ever since, more than a decade later, including by invoking the State Secrets Privilege—a blunt legal tool that enables the government to shut down cases which they claim might damage national security—to block the evidence in a court case initiated by the entire US Senate.

“They viciously tried to destroy my life, personally and professionally” says Barlow. “Not just my career, but they went after my marriage, my livelihood, and smeared my name in truly extraordinary ways that no one had ever seen before or since—at least not until the Wilsons were victims of the same people years later.”

“In my case, they suspended my security clearances and engaged in the most vicious abuses of security powers that anyone in the Congress had ever seen. They had nothing on me, so first they secretly fabricated the allegation that I was an ‘intended’ Congressional spy. Once that was found to be false, they then the secretly accused me of being an alcoholic, of not paying taxes, of adultery and more. Then they accused me of being psychotic and used that to invade my marital privacy, including that of my now ex-wife who also worked at the CIA, and sought to destroy my marriage as punishment.” He adds, “Of course, I was cleared of all of these charges, but the damage was done, as intended.”

Three years later, Rep. Solarz told Sy Hersh, “If what Barlow says is true, this would have been a major scandal of Iran-Contra proportions, and the officials involved would have had to resign.”

After two decades of investigations by the CIA Inspector General, the Department of Justice Inspector General, the State Department Inspector General, a General Accounting Office investigation, and the public record, we now know that what Barlow was saying was true.

The officials involved didn't resign. They’ve been running the country for the last six years.

Jundullah: Iran-Contra Crimes Revisited

Friday April 06th 2007, 9:39 am

It is part Contra, part “al-Qaeda,” and part Taliban. “A Pakistani tribal militant group responsible for a series of deadly guerrilla raids inside Iran has been secretly encouraged and advised by American officials since 2005,” reports ABC News. “The group, called Jundullah, is made up of members of the Baluchi tribe and operates out of the Baluchistan province in Pakistan, just across the border from Iran…. U.S. officials say the U.S. relationship with Jundullah is arranged so that the U.S. provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order or ‘finding’ as well as congressional oversight.”

Congressionally approved funding is not an issue, as Jundullah’s leader, Abd el Malik Regi, is not only “part Taliban, part Sunni activist,” but a drug smuggler as well—a not uncommon profession for “activists” working for the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. “Regi is essentially commanding a force of several hundred guerrilla fighters that stage attacks across the border into Iran on Iranian military officers, Iranian intelligence officers, kidnapping them, executing them on camera,” explained Alexis Debat, a senior fellow on counterterrorism at the Nixon Center and an ABC News consultant.

Not that you’ll hear a peep about this in the corporate media, now so obsessed with the Iranian release of British “hostages,” that is to say admitted military intelligence operatives working for the Royal Marines.

Jundullah members captured in Iran after blowing up a bus with members of the Revolutionary Guard onboard back in February “said they had been trained for the mission at a secret location in Pakistan.” Back in 2003, the CIA established “secret bases” in Pakistan, ostensibly to hunt for the dead Osama bin Laden and his dour pranksters, that is to say patsies and mental deficients.

Of course, this is but the latest effort in a long and sordid relationship between the CIA and ISI, stretching back into the 1980s when “the ISI’s Covert Action Division received training in the US and many covert action experts of the CIA were attached to the ISI to guide it in its operations against the Soviet troops by using the Afghan Mujahideen, Islamic fundamentalists of Pakistan and Arab volunteers,” according to B. Raman, writing for the South Asia Analysis Group. As we know, select members of the “Islamic fundamentalists,” particularly the “Arab volunteers,” later became “al-Qaeda,” the CIA spawned terrorist group named after a Mujahideen database.

“Some former CIA officers say the [Jundullah] arrangement is reminiscent of how the U.S. government used proxy armies, funded by other countries including Saudi Arabia, to destabilize the government of Nicaragua in the 1980s,” ABC continues.

In the Contra operation, drug smuggling played a central role, as it did in Afghanistan. “In 1984, stories began to emerge about a secret Nicaraguan Contra network run by a Lieutenant Colonel in the basement of the White House and financed by the importation of large amounts of cocaine,” write Dennis Bernstein and Julie Light. “It was soon revealed that the name of the Lieutenant Colonel was Oliver North and that there was in fact a secret illegal network that was pieced together by the Central Intelligence Agency,” a fact “actively suppressed by Democrats and Republicans alike” during the Iran-Contra hearings. The late Gary Webb, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, documented in “a three-part well-documented story … how the Contra network created, supervised, and funded by the CIA, had run for 10 years a cocaine supply line by transshipping from Central America through San Francisco and down to Los Angeles thousands of kilos of cocaine,” in essence creating the crack cocaine epidemic.

As noted in Volume II of the CIA’s Inspector General’s report, complicity in drug smuggling and the crack cocaine epidemic runs deep—either by direct participation or facilitating a cover-up—including such insiders as Richard Armitage, Frank Carlucci, Hillary and Bill Clinton, Michael Ledeen, Ed Meese, Adm. John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Casper Weinberger, and James Woolsey.

“For criminal organizations, participating in covert operations offers much more than money. They may get a voice in selecting the new government. They may get a government that owes them for help in coming to power. They may be able to use their connections with the United States government to enhance their political power at home,” explains Jack Blum, the former Chief Counsel to John Kerry’s Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism in 1996 Senate Hearings, a subcommittee chaired by Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter. “I think that if people in the government of the United States make a secret decision to sacrifice some portion of the American population in the form of … deliberately exposing them to drugs,” Blum added.

Naturally, sacrificing “some portion of the American population” is no big deal for the U.S. government—although we are told, most recently during the hysterical reaction to the comments of Rosie O’Donnell, that our government would never do such things, never mind ample evidence, from CIA biological weapons experiments conducted upon unwitting citizens to the plans detailed in Operation Northwoods to “sacrifice some portion of the American population” through terrorism and thus hopefully undermine the government of Fidel Castro. As well, history is littered with instances of the U.S. government sacrificing hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers—to say nothing of millions of victims in targeted countries—in “military adventures” stretching back to the Spanish-American War in 1898 and continuing to this day in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if the neocons have their way, Iran.

In effect, the undeclared “secret” war against Iran, well underway as the “story” on Jundullah reveals, is simply the latest episode of this long and sordid history.

It should come as no surprise the effort against Iran is a pet project of Dick Cheney. “ABC cited Pakistani government sources as saying the secret campaign against Iran was on the agenda when Vice President Dick Cheney met with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in February,” notes a post on the Indian-Muslims website.

Finally, so enamored are the neocons with Cheney, they want to run him as president in 2008, as none of the Republican selectees currently dominating the field are “hawkish” enough, that is to say they apparently lack the required degree of murderous psychosis.

“Mr. Cheney has virtues as a candidate in his own right. He has foreign policy experience by virtue of having served as defense secretary,” an op-ed appearing in the New York Sun assures us. “His wife, Lynne, would be an asset to the ticket in her own right,” as her connections to the military-snoop-industrial complex and the neocon “think tanks” run deep. Dick’s unflagging desire to expand the neocon “war” into Iran, as evidenced by his working closely with the dictator Musharraf to spawn yet another CIA created terrorist group, according to the neocon organ the New York Sun, is a “contrast to the carping over tactics that has infected some of the Republican field and to the fever among the Democrats for cutting off funds for our GIs and sounding a retreat.”

Dick Cheney is the neocon choice for president, never mind he may well keel over dead from a heart attack before the “election” come 2008. In that case, the neocons will need settle for one of the other “contenders,” none of them as blood-thirsty and sadistic as Dick.

Land of the free, home of the War on Terrorism

April 6, 2007

by William Blum

"They told us this was one of the world's worst terrorists, and he got the sentence of a drunken driver," said Ben Wizner, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, referring to David Hicks, a 31-year-old Australian who in a plea bargain with a US military court will serve nine months in prison, largely in Australia. That's after five years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba without being charged with a crime, without a trial, without a conviction. Under the deal, Hicks agreed not to talk to reporters for one year (a slap in the face of free speech), to forever waive any profit from telling his story (a slap -- mon Dieu! -- in the face of free enterprise), to submit to US interrogation and testify at future US trials or international tribunals (an open invitation to the US government to hound the young man for the rest of his life), to renounce any claims of mistreatment or unlawful detention (a requirement which would be unconstitutional in a civilian US court).

"If the United States were not ashamed of its conduct, it wouldn't hide behind a gag order," said Wizner.)[1]

Like so many other "terrorists" held by the United States in recent years, Hicks had been "sold" to the American military for a bounty offered by the US, a phenomenon repeated frequently in Afghanistan and Pakistan. US officials had to know that once they offered payments to a very poor area to turn in bodies that almost anyone was fair game.

Other "terrorists" have been turned in as reprisals for all sorts of personal hatreds and feuds.

Many others -- abroad and in the United States -- have been incarcerated by the United States simply for working for, or merely contributing money to, charitable organizations with alleged or real ties to a "terrorist organization", as determined by a list kept by the State Department, a list conspicuously political.

It was recently disclosed that an Iraqi resident of Britain is being released from Guantánamo after four years. His crime? He refused to work as an informer for the CIA and MI5, the British security service. His business partner is still being held in Guantánamo, for the same crime.[2]

Finally, there are those many other poor souls who have been picked up simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Most of these guys weren't fighting. They were running," General Martin Lucenti, former deputy commander of Guantánamo, has pointed out.[3]

Thousands of people thrown into hell on earth for no earthly good reason. The world media has been overflowing with their individual tales of horror and sadness for five very long years. Said Guantánamo's former commander, General Jay Hood: "Sometimes we just didn't get the right folks."[4] Not that the torture they were put through would be justified if they were in fact "the right folks".

Hicks was taken into custody in Afghanistan in 2001. He was a convert to Islam and like many others from many countries had gone to Afghanistan for religious reasons, had wound up on the side of the Taliban in the civil war that had been going on since the early 1990s, and had received military training at a Taliban camp. The United States has insisted on calling such camps "terrorist training camps", or "anti-American terrorist training camps", or "al-Qaeda terrorist training camps". Almost every individual or group not in love with US foreign policy, which Washington wants to stigmatize, is charged with being associated with, or being a member of, al Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American imperialism while being a member of al Qaeda and retaliating against American imperialism while NOT being a member of al Qaeda; as if al Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, as if there are chapters of al Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month.

It should be noted that for nearly half a century much of southern Florida has been one big training camp for anti-Castro terrorists. None of their groups -- which have carried out many hundreds of serious terrorist acts in the US as well as abroad, including bombing a passenger airplane in flight -- are on the State Department list. Nor were the Contras of Nicaragua in the 1980s, heavily supported by the United States, about whom former CIA Director Stansfield Turner testified: "I believe it is irrefutable that a number of the Contras' actions have to be characterized as terrorism, as State-supported terrorism."[5] The same applies to groups in Kosovo and Bosnia, with close ties to al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, in the recent past, but which have allied themselves with Washington's agenda in the former Yugoslavia since the 1990s. Now we learn of US support for a Pakistani group, called Jundullah and led by a Taliban, which has taken responsibility for the recent kidnapings and deaths and of more than a dozen Iranian soldiers and officials in cross-border attacks.[6] Do not hold your breath waiting for the name Jundallah to appear on the State Department list of terrorist organizations; nor any of the several other ethnic militias being supported by the CIA to carry out terrorist bombing and assassination attacks in Iran.[7]

The same political selectivity applies to many of the groups which are on the list, particularly those opposed to American or Israeli policies.

Amid growing pressure from their home countries and international human rights advocates, scores of Guantánamo detainees have been quietly repatriated in the past three years. Now, a new analysis by lawyers who have represented detainees at this 21st century Devil's Island says this policy undermines Washington's own claims about the threat posed by many of the prison camp's residents. The report, based on US government case files for Saudi detainees sent home over the past three years, shows inmates being systematically freed from custody within weeks of their return. In half the cases studied, the detainees had been turned over to US forces by Pakistani police or troops in return for financial rewards. Many others were accused of terrorism connections in part because their Arab nicknames matched those found in a computer database of al-Qaeda members, documents show. In December, a survey by the Associated Press found that 84 percent of released detainees -- 205 out of 245 individuals whose cases could be tracked -- were set free after being released to the custody of their native countries.

"There are certainly bad people in Guantánamo Bay, but there are also other cases where it's hard to understand why the people are still there," said Anant Raut, co-author of the report, who has visited the detention camp three times. "We were struggling to find some rationality, something to comfort us that it wasn't just random. But we didn't find it."

The report states that many of the US attempts to link the detainees to terrorism groups were based on evidence the authors describe as circumstantial and "highly questionable", such as the travel routes the detainees had followed in flying commercially from one Middle East country to another. American officials have associated certain travel routes with al Qaeda, when in fact, says the report, the routes "involve ordinary connecting flights in major international airports." With regard to accusations based on similar names, the report states: "This accusation appears to be based upon little more than similarities in the transliterations of a detainee's name and a name found on one of the hard drives."

Raut said he was most struck by the high percentage of Saudi detainees who had been captured and turned over by Pakistani forces. In effect, he said, for at least half of the group in the study, the United States "had no first-hand knowledge of their activities" in Afghanistan before their capture and imprisonment.[8]

When Michael Scheuer, former CIA officer who headed the Agency's Osama bin Laden unit, was told that the largest group in Guantánamo came from custody in Pakistan, he said: "We absolutely got the wrong people."[9]

Never mind. They were all treated equally. All thrown into solitary confinement. Shackled, blindfolded, excruciating physical contortions for long periods, denied medicine. Sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation. And two dozen other methods of torture which American officials do not call torture. (If you torture these officials, they might admit that it "torture lite".)

"The idea is to build an antiterrorist global environment," a senior American defense official said in 2003, "so that in 20 to 30 years, terrorism will be like slave-trading, completely discredited."[10]

When will the dropping of bombs on innocent civilians by the United States, and invading and occupying their country, without their country attacking or threatening the US, become completely discredited? When will the use of depleted uranium and cluster bombs and CIA torture renditions become things that even men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld will be too embarrassed to defend?

Australian/British journalist John Pilger has noted that in George Orwell's 1984 "three slogans dominate society: war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength. Today's slogan, war on terrorism, also reverses meaning. The war is terrorism."


Throwing the earth on the mercy of the market

Al Gore appeared before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on global warming on March 21. The star of "An Inconvenient Truth" was told by Cong. Joe Barton of Texas: "You're not just off a little -- you're totally wrong." In the afternoon Gore testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, during which the former vice president was told by Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma: "You've been so extreme in some of your expressions that you're losing some of your own people."[11]

These members of Congress know the facts of economic life in the United States. Fighting global warming is a threat to the principal human generator of it -- corporations -- who avail themselves of the best congress members money can buy to keep government regulations as weak as can be.

Does Al Gore know the same facts of American economic life? Of course, but you would have a hard time discerning that from his film. It's as cowardly in dealing with the corporations as Gore was in fighting the theft of the 2000 election. In the film's hour and a half, the words "corporations" or "profit" are not heard. The closest he comes to ascribing a link between the rape of the environment and the incessant corporate drive to optimize profits is a single passing mention of American automakers' reluctance to increase car gas mileage. He discusses the link between tobacco and lung cancer, as an example of how we have to "connect the dots" on environmental issues, with no mention of the tobacco corporations or their gross and deliberate deception of the American people. He states at another point that we must choose the environment over the economy, without any elucidation at all. Otherwise, the film's message is that it's up to the individual to change his habits, to campaign for renewable energy, and to write his congress member about this or that. In summary, the basic problem, he tells us, is that we're lacking "political will".

It would be most interesting if Al Gore were the president to see how tough he'd get with the corporations, which every day, around the clock, are faced with choices: one method of operation available being the least harmful to the environment, another method being the least harmful to the bottom line. Of course, Gore was vice-president for eight years and was in a fantastic and enviable position to pressure the corporations to mend their ways and Congress to enact tougher regulations; as well as to educate the public on more than their own bad habits. But what exactly did he do? Can any readers enlighten me as to what extent the man used his position and his power then in a manner consistent with the image and the word of his new film?

But could Gore be elected without corporate money? And how much of that money would reach his pocket if he advocated (choke, gasp!) free government-paid public transportation -- rail, bus, ferry, etc.? That would give birth to a breathtaking -- or rather, breath enhancing -- reduction in automobile pollution; easily paid for by ceasing America's imperialist wars.


Microsoft and the National Security Agency

I have long felt that the American media's gravest shortcoming is its errors of omission, rather than its errors of commission. It's what they leave out that distorts the news more than any factual errors or out-and-out lies. In January the Washington Post reported that Microsoft had announced that its new operating system, Vista, was being brought to us with the assistance of the National Security Agency. The NSA said it helped to protect the operating system from worms, Trojan horses and other insidious computer attackers. "Our intention is to help everyone with security," said the NSA's chief of vulnerability analysis and operations group. The spy agency, which provided its service free, said it was Microsoft's idea to acknowledge NSA's role, although the software giant declined to be specific about NSA's contributions to Vista.[12]

What the Post -- and most likely the entirety of mainstream American media -- do not remind us of is what came out in 1999 and 2000, although it's all over the Internet.

In September 1999, leading European investigative reporter Duncan Campbell revealed that NSA had arranged with Microsoft to insert special "keys" into Windows operating systems, beginning with Windows 95. An American computer scientist, Andrew Fernandez of Cryptonym in North Carolina, had disassembled parts of the Windows instruction code and found the smoking gun -- Microsoft's developers had failed to remove the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for two keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY". Fernandez presented his finding at a conference at which some Windows developers were also in attendance. The developers did not deny that the NSA key was built into their software, but they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge. Fernandez says that NSA's "back door" in the world's most commonly used operating system makes it "orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer."[13]

In February 2000, it was disclosed that the Strategic Affairs Delegation (DAS), the intelligence arm of the French Defense Ministry, had prepared a report in 1999 which also asserted that NSA had helped to install secret programs in Microsoft software. According to the DAS report, "it would seem that the creation of Microsoft was largely supported, not least financially, by the NSA, and that IBM was made to accept the [Microsoft] MS-DOS operating system by the same administration." The report stated that there had been a "strong suspicion of a lack of security fed by insistent rumours about the existence of spy programmes on Microsoft, and by the presence of NSA personnel in Bill Gates' development teams." Microsoft categorically denied all the charges and the French Defense Ministry said that it did not necessarily stand by the report, which was written by "outside experts".[14]

In case the above disturbs your image of Bill Gates and his buddies as a bunch of long-haired, liberal, peacenik computer geeks, and the company as one of the non-military-oriented halfway decent corporations, the DAS report states that the Pentagon at the time was Microsoft's biggest client in the world. The Israeli military has also been an important client. In 2002, the company erected enormous billboards in Israel which bore the Microsoft logo under the text "From the depth of our heart -- thanks to The Israeli Defense Forces", with the Israeli national flag in the background.[15]


The Myth of the Good War
Readers of this report will be aware that one of the points I try very hard to convey is that the reason so many Americans support US atrocities abroad is that they're convinced that no matter how bad things may look, the government means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable. Of that most Americans are certain. And one of the foundation stones for this edifice of patriotic faith is the Second World War, an historical saga that all Americans are taught about from childhood on. We all know what its real name is: "The Good War".

Which leads me to recommend a book, "The Myth of the Good War", by Jacques Pauwels, published in 2002. It's very well done, well argued and documented, an easy read. I particularly like the sections dealing with the closing months of the European campaign, during which the United States and Great Britain contemplated stabbing their Soviet ally in the back with maneuvers like a separate peace with Germany, using German troops to fight the Russians, and sabotaging legal attempts by various Communist Parties and other elements of the European left to share in (highly earned) political power after the war. This last piece of sabotage was of course very effectively realized. Stalin learned enough about these schemes to at least partially explain his post-war suspicious manner toward his "allies". In the West we called it "paranoia".[16]


NOTES

[1] Seattle Times, March 31, 2007

[2] Washington Post, March 30, 2007, p.11

[3] Financial Times (London), Oct 4, 2004

[4] Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2005

[5] Testimony before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, April 16, 1985

[6] ABC News, April 3, 2007

[7] Sunday Telegraph (London), February 25, 2007

[8] Washington Post, March 18, 2007

[9] Richard Ackland, "Innocence ignored at Guantanamo", Sydney Morning Herald, February 24, 2006.

[10] New York Times, January 17, 2003, p.10

[11] Washington Post, March 22, 2007, p.2

[12] Washington Post, January 9, 2007. p.D1

[13] Duncan Campbell's article of September 3, 1999 can be found on the website of TechWeb: http://www.techweb.com/wire/29110640

[14] Agence France Presse, February 18 and 21, 2000

[15] To see one of the billboards: www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0022.html

[16] http://www.alys.be/pauwels/2publi_the_myth.htm
Available in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch editions


William Blum is the author of:
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

Pakistan's $4.2 Billion 'Blank Check' for U.S. Military Aid

After 9/11, funding to country soars with little oversight

By Nathaniel Heller, Sarah Fort and Marina Walker Guevara
Data analysis by Ben Welsh

WASHINGTON, March 27, 2007 — In the three years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. military aid to Pakistan soared to $4.2 billion, compared to $9.1 million in the three years before the attacks — a 45,000 percent increase — boosting Pakistan to the top tier of countries receiving this type of funding.

More than half of the new money was provided through a post-9/11 Defense Department program — Coalition Support Funds — not closely tracked by Congress.

--MORE--

Pakistan's $4.2 Billion 'Blank Check' for U.S. Military Aid

After 9/11, funding to country soars with little oversight

By Nathaniel Heller, Sarah Fort and Marina Walker Guevara
Data analysis by Ben Welsh

WASHINGTON, March 27, 2007 — In the three years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. military aid to Pakistan soared to $4.2 billion, compared to $9.1 million in the three years before the attacks — a 45,000 percent increase — boosting Pakistan to the top tier of countries receiving this type of funding.

More than half of the new money was provided through a post-9/11 Defense Department program — Coalition Support Funds — not closely tracked by Congress.

--MORE--

Taliban 'invite' 10,000 Uzbeks to Helmand

By Massoud Ansari, Sunday Telegraph

Last Updated: 12:55am GMT 25/03/2007

Islamic militants linked to Osama bin Laden have been offered a safe haven by the Taliban in Afghanistan, bringing them into conflict with British troops patrolling the lawless province of Helmand.

Uzbek gunmen, who fought a series of bloody battles last week with Pakistani tribesmen in the border region of Waziristan, where they had been living, have been told they should join the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan instead.

The move raises the prospect of a major upsurge in violence in Helmand, where 43 British soldiers have been killed in clashes with militants over the last five

(Map of Afghanistan and surrounding region)

years.

The group of around 10,000 Uzbeks are led by Tahir Yuldashev, a close associate of the al-Qaeda terrorist chief, who is believed to be hiding out in the mountainous border area with his chief henchman Ayman al-Zawahiri.

The members of the Islamic Movement Union of Uzbekistan fell out with their Pakistani hosts after accusing some tribal leaders of acting as agents of the Pakistani government, which is under huge pressure from the US to crack down on Islamic militants. Pakistan government officials said that nearly 160 people, including 130 Uzbeks, were killed in the battle.
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Taliban fighters intervened to broker a ceasefire but local officials have told The Sunday Telegraph that neither side is likely to back down. Taliban sources have revealed that they have offered the Uzbeks safe passage into Afghanistan in order to bring an end to the violence.

The militant group are wanted by the Uzbek government of President Islam Karimov and cannot return to their own country.

Lateef Afridi, a tribal leader and former national assembly member from the Frontier province, who is privy to details of the discussions, said: "These tribesmen are quite determined to flush them out. Given that these Uzbeks cannot be extradited back to their own country because they are all wanted there, one way they are considering to accommodate them is to send them to Afghanistan."

Mr Afridi said the Taliban felt compelled to give the Uzbeks a way out because if the battle continued between the local tribesmen and the foreign fighters, the Taliban elements would have to choose which side to back, unleashing further bloodshed. Another source added: "Both the sides are led by highly trained militants and if the fighting is not stopped, there will be massive killings."

A second tribal leader said the local and Afghan Taliban forces had already approached the Uzbeks and asked them to continue their jihad in Taliban-dominated areas in Afghanistan, in a bid to "reinvigorate their campaign of violence against Nato troops". They have been offered safe passage to either Kunar, Paktia or Helmand, where British troops are braced for a spring offensive from the Taliban.

Britain has announced plans to raise the UK military presence in Afghanistan to more than 7,000 troops. But the presence of a new wave of heavily armed guerrilla fighters is likely to leave troops stretched further and strengthen calls for an even greater military presence.

For Pakistan, forcing out the Uzbeks has the advantage of undermining support for Osama bin Laden.

His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been spotted in Waziristan several times. If the local tribesmen succeed, it will deny bin Laden one more safe haven for his associates, according to one western diplomat.

The Uzbeks are believed to have killed more than 1,500 local tribesmen in the past two years and are blamed for kidnapping others.

Mr Afridi said: "The partial ceasefire was achieved only for a time being, when the Taliban leaders intervened, but it did not give both the parties enough time to carry out the dead. The corpses and broken limbs of the dead are scattered all over the area."

When Less Is Best: RORY STEWART - Afghanistan

Editor's note: I am posting at a NEW site: http://mparent7777-3.blogspot.com/
(also see new articles below). The new site is strictly for overflow. The software at my 2 present sites won't let me post for the next couple of hours. I maybe back posting at the site you are now looking at later today.
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THE COMPLETE ARTICLE
THE NEW YORK TIMES
GUEST COLUMNIST

When Less Is Best

By RORY STEWART

Published: March 20, 2007

The United States needs to be honest about what it wants from Afghanistan and what it can achieve.

Why are we in Afghanistan? Vice President Cheney talks terror, Britain focuses on narcotics. The European Union talks ‘state-building,’ others gender. On a different day, the positions seem interchangeable. Five years ago, we had a clear goal. Now we seem to be pursuing a bundle of objectives, from counterinsurgency to democratization and development, which are presented as uniform but which are in fact logically distinct and sometimes contradictory.

Finance officers in Kabul and shepherds in Kandahar want to know what we did with the $10 billion we spent in the last four years. So do any number of commentators on Afghan TV and radio. And when Helmand villagers see soldiers from countries thousands of miles away carrying guns and claiming to be only building schools, they don’t believe them.

I have noticed that many Afghans now simply assume we are engaged in a grand conspiracy. Nothing else in their minds can explain the surreal gap between our language and performance. The United States needs to be honest about what it wants from Afghanistan and what it can achieve.

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Why Pakistan is crucial to the world's stability

Denis Macshane
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer

Anyone who wants political power in Pakistan, so say the street pundits, must hold three aces - America, the army and Allah. As Pakistan plans its 60th birthday celebrations this year, it may hope for a future less in thrall to its military, to its mullahs and to Washington. President Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a bloody 1999 coup, is facing a crisis.

Far from being Nato's calm eastern ally, a new front in the fight against terrorism, Islamabad's streets feel shaky, divided and waiting for the worst. Pakistan is neither dictatorship nor democracy. Its newspapers are louder in criticism of their President than the anti-Blair or anti-Bush press in the West. Its intellectuals roam the world, trashing their country. Opposition politician, Cambridge-educated billionaire, Benazir Bhutto, is free to return home when she wants. But General Musharraf and his army are in charge. The house arrest of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, after he refused Musharraf's demand to resign, has caused outrage. In a nation that reveres high office, the manhandling of the judge shocked even the most cynical of Pakistani politicians.

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Pakistan urgently needs a return to democratic civilian rule even if its elected leaders in the Nineties became bywords for corruption, encouraging the Taliban and the madrassas, as well as the long-bearded, turban-wearing politicians who insist the law should be subordinate to theocracy. Democracy requires compromise between the military and the politicians. Instead there may be a slow drift towards increased authoritarianism under Musharraf, further alienating Pakistan.

In fact, the most poignant story in Pakistan last week was not about the Chief Justice but the stoning to death of a woman and two men accused of adultery. The rise of religious intolerance is now a political danger from the Christian West to the Muslim East. Yet it is all too easy to patronise Pakistan. Britain is currently gushing over India with its clever graduates and Midas-touch businessmen. But India's record on human rights and the illiteracy of half its population is little better than Pakistan's. India is rightly seen as a strategic partner for the West, especially the US, which is playing a balance-of-power game using India against China. But Pakistan, not India, is key to stability in the new world order.

The chain reaction that began when the West and Saudi Arabia called into being the jihadi movement to oust the Russians from Afghanistan is coming back to haunt Pakistan. In the Eighties it allowed itself to be the base for military attacks on Russia, even as the USSR tottered on the edge of history's dustbin. Now the jihadis are heading steadily eastwards as fanatical Islamism preaches hate and justifies suicide bombings. But Afghanistan could be saved if a political-economic-social campaign can gain ground from a purely military definition of the challenges. Earlier this month US soldiers ran amok after a bomb attack. They fired indiscriminately, killing 30 people. A few more Bloody Sundays like this and Pakistan's neighbour will be Iraqified before reconstruction pays off.

Britain is sending one of its toughest trouble-shooting diplomats to take over a beefed-up presence in Kabul. The UN agencies, the European Commission plus the European Council, plus dozens of NGOs constitute the huge effort being made in Afghanistan, yet without better co-ordination it may end up chasing its tail.

The news is good in terms of schools, roads and hospitals built. Kabul looks richer than when it was a hippy-trail stopover three decades ago. But relentlessly the Taliban and the jihadis from among the three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan are back in business. Pakistan is endlessly reproached about not doing enough. It is told to close its frontier, as if the US can close the Mexican border or 30,000 British soldiers could seal the border across which IRA killers roamed. Pakistan is pressured to hunt bin Laden, but Nato can't find Radovan Karadzic or persuade the Serbian army to stop protecting Ratko Mladic.

The time is overdue to acknowledge the sacrifices Pakistan has made. It has 80,000 soldiers along the 2,300km frontier with Afghanistan; 500 have been killed, far in excess of Nato casualties in Afghanistan or Britain's in Iraq. India could join the war against terror by removing its 700,000 soldiers from Kashmir and opening the border. Musharraf has been braver than his predecessors in acknowledging that Indian-controlled Kashmir is not going to return to Pakistan.

If Pakistan felt its eastern flank was secure, it could transfer its military to the west - Afghanistan. Britain in recent years has given £1bn in aid to India, while India spends £200m on aid to Afghanistan. UK aid is, in effect, subsidising India's efforts to pull Afghanistan into its orbit. India is opening consulates in parts of Afghanistan where no Indian has been seen in years. From Pakistan's perspective, this looks like India seeking influence in order to keep up pressure on its old foe.

This summer heroin will be cheaper on the streets of Pakistan than sweets. India and China have a bigger drugs problem than the UK. Both countries should cut Islamabad some slack. If Afghanistan goes wrong, the next target for the ideologues who unleash suicide bombers will be Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal. Pakistan is the key to defeating the new threats to the world. Time and again, the West has turned its back on Pakistan. That mistake should not be made again. Britain, with its close links to Pakistan, its able, articulate Muslim MPs, and its duty to tell America to change tactics, should help before it is too late.

· Denis MacShane is Labour MP for Rotherham and was a minister at the Foreign Office until 2005.

Without a trace

Seven-year-old Saud Bugti's father was picked up by secret police on a street corner in Karachi last November. No one has heard from him since. He has joined the ranks of Pakistan's 'disappeared' - victims of the country's brutal attempts to wage war on both al-Qaida and those who fail to support the government. But how many innocent people are being caught up in this? And what is America's connection to the barbaric torture of suspects? Declan Walsh reports

Friday March 16, 2007
The Guardian

Saud Bugti, 7, whose father disappeared last November. Photograph: Declan Walsh

They vanish quietly and quickly. Some are dragged from their beds in front of their terrified families. Others are hustled off the streets into a waiting van, or yanked from a bus at a lonely desert junction. A windowless world of sweat and fear awaits. In dark cells, nameless men bark questions. The men brandish rubber whips, clenched fists, whirring electric drills, pictures of Osama bin Laden. The ordeal can last weeks, months or years.

Article continues

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These are Pakistan's disappeared - men and women who have been abducted, imprisoned and in some cases tortured by the country's all-powerful intelligence agencies. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has counted 400 cases since 2002; it estimates hundreds more people may have been snatched. The phenomenon started with the great sweeps for al-Qaida suspects after September 11, but has dramatically increased in recent years, and now those who disappear include homegrown "enemies of the state" - poets, doctors, housewives and nuclear scientists, accused of terrorism, treason and murder. Guilty or innocent, it's hard to know, because not one has appeared before a court.

An angry Pakistani public wants to know why. The disappearances are increasingly perceived as Pakistan's Guantánamo Bay - a malignant outgrowth of the "war on terror". This week, the issue moved centre stage with the showdown between President Pervez Musharraf and Pakistan's chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Many believe the judge is being victimised for championing the cases of the disappeared. "These are Gestapo tactics," says Iqbal Haider, a former minister. "The more we protest, the more innocent people are being hurt. And what frightening stories they tell."

For Abid Zaidi it started with a phone call one afternoon last April. The softly spoken 26-year-old was at work at Karachi University's department of zoology in a cavernous room of stuffed animals, sagging skeletons and yellowing name tags. The voice on the phone instructed him to report to Sadder police station in the city centre. There, a handful of men were waiting for him: he believes they belonged to Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the army's powerful spy agency. They clapped cuffs on his wrists, wrapped a band around his eyes and drove him to a cell. Then, he says, the torture started.

The men beat him, he says, with a chain, until he collapsed. He was brought to a military hospital; there doctors brushed off his pleas for help. Then he was flown to another detention centre, where he was shown graphic images of torture. "People's skin was being removed with knives and blades and they were being drilled," he says. "It was really terrible." Then they hung him upside down from a butcher's hook, his face dipping into a pool of sewage water.

The interrogators wanted Zaidi to admit his supposed part in the Nishtar Park bombings. In early April, a suicide bomber had killed 50 people at a Sunni religious gathering in central Karachi. The officials accused Zaidi, a prominent young Shia, of orchestrating the massacre. Zaidi tried to explain he was more interested in zoology than zealotry. They did not believe him.

In July, an official told him he had been sentenced to hang. Zaidi wrote a will. "I felt at peace because I knew God was with me," he says. But it was a ruse. At 4am on the morning of the "execution", having refused to admit his guilt, a dramatic reprieve was announced. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a lie detector test and on August 18 he was flown to Karachi. The blindfold was lifted. Zaidi was driven through the city. The car stopped, a man handed him 200 rupees (£1.80) and pushed the car door open. "He said, 'Don't open your eyes,'" says Zaidi. When the engine noise had receded, he found himself standing at a bus stop near Karachi University. He got down on his knees and prayed. Then he phoned his brother to take him home.

Zaidi's account cannot be verified because, officially speaking, he was never in government custody. However a senior police officer familiar with the case describes it as a major embarrassment. "That boy was picked up by a young officer," says the official, who asks not to be named. "[The police] knew it was the wrong guy. But they refused to listen."

The ISI is the most powerful arm of Pakistan's intelligence establishment, commonly referred to as "the agencies". Founded by a British army officer in 1948 and headquartered at an anonymous concrete block in Islamabad, the ISI is famed and feared in equal part. Its influence soared during the 1980s, when it smuggled vast amounts of American-funded weapons to mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. More recently, it has organised guerrilla groups fighting Indian troops in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The other major agencies in Pakistan are Military Intelligence and the civilian Intelligence Bureau, and all three of these major agencies have variously been accused of rigging elections, extra-judicial assassinations and other dirty tricks.

But until 9/11, disappearances were rare. Then, in late 2001, as al-Qaida fugitives fled from Afghanistan into Pakistan, Musharraf ordered that the agencies show full cooperation to the FBI, CIA and other US security agencies. In return, the Americans would give them equipment, expertise and money.

Suddenly, Pakistan's agencies had sophisticated devices to trace mobile phones, bug houses and telephone calls, and monitor large volumes of email traffic. "Whatever it took to improve the Pakistanis' technical ability to find al-Qaida fighters, we were there to help them," says Michael Scheuer, a former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit. An official with an American organisation says he once received a startling demonstration of the ISI's new capabilities. Driving down a street inside a van with ISI operatives, he could monitor phone conversations taking place in every house they passed. "It was very impressive, and really quite spooky," he says.

The al-Qaida hunt became a matter of considerable pride for President Bush's close friend, the president of Pakistan. "We have captured 672 and handed over 369 to the United States. We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars," wrote Musharraf in his autobiography last year. (The boast sparked outrage at home in Pakistan and was scrubbed from later Urdu-language versions of his book.) Prize captures included the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, who has apparently confessed to a string of terror plots after four years as a captive, and Abu Faraj al Libbi, another alleged bin Laden lieutenant. But certain innocents were also swept up in the dragnet.

Brothers Zain and Kashan Afzal, for example, were detained and beaten many times over eight months by Pakistani agents convinced they belonged to al-Qaida. Zain, now 25, remembers that, in between the thrashings, the "FBI wallahs" - a woman and two men - would come to visit. "They showed me a picture of Osama and asked if I knew him," he says at his home in Karachi. "I told them I had only seen him on television." As American citizens - the brothers were born in the US, where their father lives - they might have expected better treatment. Instead, they got threats. "The Americans said if we did not tell them everything, they would send us to Guantánamo Bay," says Zain.

Like many of the disappeared, the Afzals had a colourful past that drew the attention of the agencies. According to a well-informed source, their names appeared on a list of potential recruits found on a laptop belonging to Naeem Noor Khan, an al-Qaida computer expert arrested weeks earlier, in July 2004. They were also questioned about a visit they had made to the lawless tribal belt of Waziristan. But whatever they had done, it was clearly not enough to warrant prosecution by either Pakistan or the US. In April 2005, they were brought to Lahore airport, handed a pair of airplane tickets in other people's names, and set free.

The physical damage has healed - Zain suffered a burst eardrum - but the mental scars remain. "He hears voices in the night coming to take him away again," says his wife Sara. The couple agreed to meet the Guardian and give their first newspaper interview in an attempt to press their case for a new American passport. Despite numerous entreaties, the US consulate in Karachi has stonewalled requests to re-issue their passports, which were confiscated during their arrest. "I am scared because of what has happened," says Sara. "Pakistan is not a reliable country, you know." A US embassy spokeswoman in Islamabad declines to comment on their case.

The truth is that the American government still quietly supports the disappearances of al-Qaida suspects, says Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch, which has documented many cases. "The abuse has become even more brazen because of US complicity," he says. He claims that American officials are regular visitors to ISI safehouses in Islamabad, Lahore and Rawalpindi where torture has occurred. They have supervised interrogations from behind one-way mirrors, he says. In FBI internal documents, he says, torture is referred to as "locally acceptable forms of interrogation".

For some detainees the safehouses are the back door to the mysterious world of CIA "black sites" - secret prisons in Afghanistan, eastern Europe and across the Arab world where torture is allegedly rife. Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian who was picked up in 2004, recently gave an extraordinarily detailed account of life in this system. After being tortured by ISI agents in Lahore - they strapped a rubber band around his penis - he said he was moved to a "villa" in Islamabad where he was questioned by US officials. "It seemed to me that this place was controlled by Americans. They were in charge," he told Human Rights Watch. "They would say: 'If you cooperate, we'll let you sleep.'" A female official told him in Arabic, "Fuck Allah in the ass." One of four fellow Pakistani detainees bore the marks of severe torture. "You can't imagine how much they were hurting him," said Jabour, who was released last summer.

In its annual human rights report published last Tuesday, the US State Department acknowledged the disappearances but skated around the US's own role. "The country experienced an increase in disappearances of provincial activists and political opponents," it noted.

In fact, most recent disappearances have nothing to do with al-Qaida. To quell an insurgency in Baluchistan - a vast western province with massive oil and gas reserves - the agencies, in particular Military Intelligence, have rounded up hundreds of suspected rebels in the past two years. Of the 99 abductions registered by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan last year, 73 were from Baluchistan. Officials believe many more have gone unreported. Shamsa Toon, a 70-year-old woman, crouches on the pavement outside Karachi's Press Club clutching a giant photograph of her son, Gohram Saleh. He has been missing since August 8 2004, she says; this was the 166th day of her vigil. Her 13-year-old granddaughter is threatening to commit suicide if there was no news. "He's just a cab driver, not any rebel," she says, tears streaming down her face. "His only crime is that he is a Baluch."

Musharraf's officials swat the issue away with blunt denials. "I can say with authority that these people are not with any agency or government department," says Brigadier Iqbal Cheema, head of the "crisis management cell", which spearheads anti-terror operations, at the Interior Ministry. "Most of these people creating a hue and cry belong to the militant organisations and have jihadi backgrounds. They are involved in these activities themselves." But the current confrontation with the chief justice has brought a renewed focus. Western diplomats are queasy about such obvious abuses from an ally they claim is "moving towards democracy". And the death of Hayatullah Khan, a tribal journalist who was found dead last June after seven months apparently in the custody of the agencies, has further fuelled the outrage.

Last November, Chaudhry, the chief justice, ordered the agencies to "find" 41 people who had gone missing. Subsequently, half were quietly released. But the court actions have mostly just underlined the impotence of the civilian institutions in the face of a powerful military machine. When ISI lawyers plead that they "cannot locate" certain detainees, the judges can only fume and bang their benches.

Meanwhile, tearful relatives are left grasping for even a shred of news. Qazim Bugti, the mayor of Dera Bugti, a small town in Baluchistan, was picked up last November. His wife Asmat, left behind to look after their five children, weeps when she talks of her husband's disappearance. "Does President Musharraf not have children of his own? Would he like to see them treated like this?" she says in the family's Karachi apartment. She agrees to speak despite whispered phone warnings to keep quiet: the agencies do not appreciate publicity.

Several relatives say they have been instructed not to contact the media or human rights groups. Khalid Khawaja, who led a pressure group on behalf of some detainees, himself went missing last month. He was reportedly taken to Attock Fort, a notorious military prison. But the most audacious disappearance, perhaps, is that of Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost.

During his three years of captivity in Guantánamo Bay, Dost, 37, became known as the "poet of Guantánamo" for his sharp verse. After his release, he wrote The Broken Shackles of Guantánamo, and it was published in the Pashto language last September; it became an instant hit in Peshawar's bookstalls, selling more than 10,000 copies. It also contained stinging criticism of the ISI. Weeks later, policemen in a van abducted Dost as he walked from his local mosque after Friday prayers. His brother, Badruzzaman Badr - also a former Guantánamo detainee - says, "The book is the reason behind this. They are angry about what we have written. They claim to have democracy and freedom of expression in this country, but it is not real."

When Dost's case came before a local court for the third time in January, the judges again asked the ISI to produce the missing man. Again there was no answer. Now Badruzzaman, who has abandoned his gemstone business and no longer sleeps at home, fears he will be next. "I do not feel safe, they could arrest me any time. But where can I go?" he says.

Abid Zaidi, the zoology student from Karachi, has also learned the price of going public. In late October, he travelled to Islamabad to describe his ordeal before a press conference organised by Amnesty International. Shortly afterwards he was picked up again, this time by men in uniform. Zaidi says they were flushed with anger. "They told me: 'Next time, we will not pick you up. We will kill you'".

A False Choice for Pakistan: Benazir Bhutto

By Benazir Bhutto

Monday, March 12, 2007; A13

Last month President Bush told Gen. Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan that he must be more aggressive in hunting down al-Qaeda and the Taliban along his country's border with Afghanistan. During his recent visit to Islamabad, Vice President Cheney echoed the claim that al-Qaeda members were training in Pakistan's tribal areas and called on Musharraf to shut down their operations. British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett also expressed concern recently about suspected terrorist safe havens.

Clearly, the pressure is on. Western leaders are finally beginning to recognize that Musharraf's regime has been unsuccessful in taming the Taliban, which has regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan while the military regime has given up trying to establish order on the Afghan border. At the same time, the regime has strategically chosen to help the United States when international criticism of the terrorists' presence becomes strident. The arrest of Mullah Obaidullah Akhund, a top Taliban strategist, by Pakistani authorities late last month is a case in point. The timing, right on the heels of American and British pleas for renewed toughness, is too convenient. Akhund was arrested solely to keep Western governments at bay.

There are other political calculations in all of this. For too long, the international perception has been that Musharraf's regime is the only thing standing between the West and nuclear-armed fundamentalists.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Islamic parties have never garnered more than 13 percent in any free parliamentary elections in Pakistan. The notion of Musharraf's regime as the only non-Islamist option is disingenuous and the worst type of fear-mongering.

Much has been said about Pakistan being a key Western ally in the war against terrorism. It is the fifth-largest recipient of U.S. aid -- the Bush administration proposed $785 million in its latest budget. Yet terrorism around the world has increased. Why is it that all terrorist plots -- from the Sept. 11 attacks, to Madrid, to London, to Mumbai -- seem to have roots in Islamabad?

Pakistan's military and intelligence services have, for decades, used religious parties for recruits. Political madrassas -- religious schools that preach terrorism by perverting the faith of Islam -- have spread by the tens of thousands.

The West has been shortsighted in dealing with Pakistan. When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation -- namely, life, liberty and justice for all. Dictatorships such as Musharraf's suppress individual rights and freedoms and empower the most extreme elements of society. Oppressed citizens, unable to represent themselves through other means, often turn to extremism and religious fundamentalism.

Restoring democracy through free, fair, transparent and internationally supervised elections is the only way to return Pakistan to civilization and marginalize the extremists. A democratic Pakistan, free from the yoke of military dictatorship, would cease to be a breeding ground for international terrorism.

Indeed, Pakistan's return to democracy is essential to America's success in South and Central Asia, as well as in the Middle East, as democratization is an integral part of fighting terrorism. Wouldn't it therefore be prudent to tie aid money to genuine political reform?

Pakistan must take steps toward hunting down al-Qaeda operatives in the "ungovernable" tribal and border areas -- which were once successfully governed by democratically elected civilian governments. The regime must also stop its intimidation tactics of recent weeks, which include brutal murders, assassination attempts and other attacks on opposition party members.

Of course Musharraf's regime, to legitimize its coup and divert attention from the institutionalized corruption of the military, accuses Pakistan's secular, democratic parties of corruption. But according to Transparency International, 67 percent of the people believe the regime is corrupt, surpassing the rate for past civilian governments. Musharraf's regime has lasted twice as long as any civilian government in Pakistan. Yet not one of its ministers or key political supporters has been investigated.

The National Accountability Bureau has persecuted opposition leaders for a decade on unproven corruption and mismanagement charges, hoping to grind them into submission. However, when politicians accused of corruption cross over to the regime, the charges miraculously disappear. Musharraf's regime exploits the judicial system as yet another instrument of coercion and intimidation to consolidate its illegitimate power. But the politics of personal destruction will not prevent me and other party leaders from bringing our case before the people of our nation this year, even if that could lead to imprisonment.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Bush said, "The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity. And I say, for the sake of our own security: We must."

This holds true for countries in South and Central Asia as well. Now is the time to force Pakistan's government to make good on its promise to return to democracy.

The writer is chairwoman of the Pakistan People's Party and served as prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and from 1993 to 1996. She lives in exile in Dubai.

US pressuring Pakistan to get its support for attack on Iran: Former spy chief

US pressurizing Pak to get its support for attack on Iran: Gul

ISLAMABAD: Former ISI Chief, Gen (retd) Hameed Gul has said that the Untied States is paving the way to use Pakistan's territory for its expected attack on Iran in order to shift the blame of its failure in Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Talking to a private TV Channel, Gen (retd) Hameed Gul said that NATO forces have intensified their activities on Pak-Afghan border as they are frustrated due to their failure in Afghanistan.

Former ISI Chief has said that US backed Karzai government has been completely failed in Afghanistan and the United States has now realized that they are now facing strong resistance from Taliban.

General (retd) Hamid Gul said that its an American policy to use different tactics to pressurize Pakistan and the main objective of recent visit of US Vice President Dick Cheney to pressurize Pakistan as US would need Pakistan's support and Balochistan land to attack Iran. He said that it may be the possibility that Pakistani government is refusing the United States to given permission to use its land.

Criticizing severely on the government, former ISI Chief said that Pakistan presently facing difficult time of its history due to weak politics of present government. Pakistan is a strong and nuclear capable country and has impregnable defence, he added.

Afghan, US forces attack Pakistan Army

Afghan, US forces target Pak post

By Mushtaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR: The Afghan Army and US forces based in Afghanistan attacked a joint post of the Pakistan Army and paramilitary Frontier Corps at Lowara Mandi in North Waziristan agency on the Pak-Afghan border while US gunship helicopters were noticed violating Pakistan’s airspace during the past two days.

The US troops also took away a local shepherd to their base on Sunday when they entered the Pakistani territory. However, Pakistani officials denied the attack and termed it beyond truth. Official as well as tribal sources informed The News from Miramshah, headquarters of North Waziristan Agency, that it was second attack by the Afghan and coalition forces on Pakistani security post during the past one week.

They said the post, which is known as Kunar post, was attacked with 12.7 machineguns Saturday night. However, no loss of life or damage to property was reported in the attack. According to sources, Pakistani forces did not retaliate and it was possible the target were fighters either crossing into Afghanistan’s Paktika province or North Waziristan at night.

Eyewitness told this scribe on phone that Afghan and US military personnel held a local tribal shepherd, Sher Ali son of Gul Khan and took him to a US base on the other side of the border in Paktika.

“There were 16 US troops and several Afghan army soldiers who came in four vehicles and put Sher Ali in their vehicle and took him to Afghanistan,” explained a local tribesman. He said since there was no border line between the two neighbouring countries, it was possible that the tribal shepherd mistakenly crossed into Afghanistan and was thus caught by the troops.

Local tribal people have been noticing US gunship helicopters flying several kilometres inside Pakistani territory for the last several days. Meanwhile, the Afghan and US forces Sunday set up a new security post near Khost province on Ghulam Khan border and installed heavy weapons there.

Pakistani officials told The News they were demanding similar posts from Afghan and US officials on the border to check cross-border movement of terrorists, as it was difficult for Pakistan to check the long porous border between the two countries alone.

Don’t push Pakistan too far

BY ERIC MARGOLIS

4 March 2007

VICE-President Dick Cheney’s visit last week to South Asia was not what one could call a rousing success.

Cheney, the real power behind the Bush Administration, arrived at Bagram air base, formerly the nerve centre for the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Today, it plays the same role for the US occupation. A suicide bomber attacked the base’s main gate, killing a score of soldiers and civilians and hugely embarrassing Cheney. Worse, the 60 km ‘secure’ highway between Bagram and Kabul has become so dangerous that Cheney could not travel by road through this region which is deemed highly secure by US and NATO forces to meet with the American-installed figurehead leader, Hamid Karzai, who is constantly surrounded by up to 200 US bodyguards.

Anti-western forces are quickly gaining ground in Afghanistan. What Washington and its NATO allies keep claiming is an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ against a handful of Al Qaeda fighters and Taleban has, in fact, turned into fast-growing Afghan national resistance to foreign occupation. Were it not for the US Air Force’s might and ubiquitous presence, US, Canadian, and British troops would soon be driven from southern Afghanistan. The respected Senlis Council, which closely monitors Afghanistan, reports half that nation is now under Taleban control or influence.

The fast-deteriorating situation there is provoking furious finger-pointing. Washington and NATO are angrily blaming Pakistan for sheltering and abetting Taleban and its allies. Pakistan blames the feeble Karzai regime which can’t control its own territory. Now, US intelligence reports that Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself in spite of President George Bush’s so-called $690 billion ‘war on terror.’

Cheney went on to Pakistan to threaten President Pervez Musharraf, with a cutoff of US aid — and perhaps much worse — if he didn’t crack down further on Pashtun tribesmen in the frontier provinces who are aiding Taleban and other Pashtun and nationalist resistance groups. The western powers are following India’s lead over Kashmir by accusing Pakistan of ‘cross-border terrorism.’

This is untrue. The 40 million Pashtun, the world’s largest tribe, have never recognised the British-drawn 1893 border between Pakistan and Afghanistan that cuts their traditional territory in two. They cross it at will and maintain close links with relatives and clansmen on the other side of the border who strongly support Taleban and its allies.

In the 1980’s and 90’s, I explored and became fascinated by the wild, lawless, then little-known frontier tribal agencies of north and south Waziristan, Khyber, Mohmand, Orakzai and Malakand. Their warlike, fiercely independent tribes joined Pakistan in 1947 under constitutional guarantee of total autonomy that excluded government soldiers from the tribal agencies.

Intense US pressure forced Musharraf to violate Pakistan’s constitution by sending troops into the tribal territories. The army shamefully launched heavy attacks, killing over 3,000 civilians. Outrage across Pakistan forced Musharraf to back down and withdraw some troops. ‘Fight India, not your own people,’ cried the press. It was one of the darkest days for Pakistan’s Army.

Many Pakistanis oppose the US occupation of Afghanistan, support their old anti-communist ally, Taleban, and think better of Osama bin Laden than George Bush. Many senior and junior officers in Pakistan’s military and powerful intelligence service, ISI, feel similarly and are bitter at Musharraf for abandoning Taleban and resistance groups fighting to oust Indian rule in divided Kashmir.

Musharraf is thus caught between Washington’s growing demands and his own people who increasingly accuse him of being an American tool. Washington simply does not understand it has pushed the isolated, unpopular Musharraf too far already. If he is blown up or overthrown, Pakistan and its 40-60 nuclear weapons, could turn into an even bigger and more dangerous hotbed of anti-western activity. The next army corps commander who takes over may not be as amenable to Washington’s demands as Pervez Musharraf.

Meanwhile, Washington is increasingly blaming its Afghanistan fiasco on whipping boy Pakistan, just as the Vietnam defeat was blamed on infiltration from Cambodia and Laos. Recently, a remarkably ill-informed Canadian defense minister foolishly proposed sending Canadian troops into Pakistan’s tribal agencies to ‘fight terrorists.’

Picking a fight with old, loyal ally Pakistan is both morally wrong and fraught with untold dangers. The US has forgotten how it forced another compliant military ruler, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, into policies his people hated. He was assassinated, to national joy.

Negotiating a deal with Taleban and other Afghan resistance forces is the only way out of the current morass, not undermining Pakistan or expanding a war that is already lost.

Eric S. Margolis is a veteran American journalist and contributing foreign editor of The Toronto Sun

US may be 'undermining' Pakistan

By Shahzeb Jillani
BBC News, Washington

Pakistan's ambassador to the US has warned that American pressure to do more in the war against terror could undermine President Musharraf.

He said the country could be destabilised as a result.

Ambassador Mehmud Ali Durrani told the BBC that recent US congressional threats to cut off military aid to Pakistan could create major problems.

He said it could strengthen anti-American extremist elements in Pakistan and jeopardise warm relations.

Pressure growing

The ambassador's statement is an attempt to paint a doomsday scenario for Pakistan if the US continues to step up pressure on Pakistan's military leadership.

Pakistan is the only Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons and the thought of "a destabilised Pakistan" where staunchly anti-American Islamists could prevail over an apparently moderate leader has long worried many in Washington.

Ever since President Musharraf signed a controversial peace deal with the militants in North Waziristan last September, US pressure has been steadily growing on Pakistan to act more decisively in crushing the Taleban and al-Qaeda threat in its tribal areas.

Pakistan has been trying, rather unsuccessfully, to convince the western world that the country is doing, and has done, all it can to tackle the extremist threat.

'Frustration'

The Pakistani ambassador's statement reflects the frustration Pakistani officials are experiencing on this front.

He told the BBC: "We are telling Americans that Pakistan is your friend. We want to help you. Let's work together instead of exerting undue pressure on us."

In January, the Democrat-controlled US House of Representatives passed a measure effectively linking all future military sales to the country's performance in the fighting the war on terror.

The proposed legislation is currently under consideration in the US Senate.

The White House publicly says it values the co-operation from President Musharraf and does not support putting new conditions on the country.

But, as hinted during Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Pakistan earlier this week, the Bush administration is reportedly growing impatient with what it regards as inadequate results from Pakistan.

Pakistan makes a deal with the Taliban

Pakistan makes a deal with the Taliban

Pakistan has made a deal to give logistical support to the Taliban in southwest Afghanistan. Islamabad desperately wants a foothold in the country and the Taliban need more muscle for their resistance. Veteran Taliban commander and diplomatic facilitator Mullah Dadullah is making it all happen, even as US Vice President Dick Cheney urges Islamabad to "get tough on the Taliban".
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Cheney meets a general in his labyrinth
The congruence of interests between the Bush administration and the regime of President General Pervez Musharraf has no parallel in previous US-Pakistan relations. To belittle the general, to chastise him like an errant schoolboy over the Taliban and al-Qaeda - this was the last thing US Vice President Dick Cheney had in mind. In the big picture, which includes Iran, the US has a vital role for Islamabad. - M K Bhadrakumar (Feb 28, '07)

Afghanistan's proxy war

XENIA DORMANDY

By Xenia Dormandy | February 16, 2007

THE PAPERS ARE full of the slow demise of Afghanistan. The Pakistanis are to blame; no, the Afghans; no, the United States. America didn't do enough or did too much. NATO isn't stepping up to the plate, or is it the Germans, or the French people. Is it the Taliban, Al Qaeda , or Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence that is pulling the strings? Is President Karzai powerless, or is he boosting the warlords, or is he a puppet for Americans , or all three? The blame is widespread.

But a large part of the problem is being missed. There's talk about the U S -Pakistan-Afghanistan tripartite, but it's the wrong one. The focus should be on the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India triangle.

In the 1980 s and early 1990 s, Afghanistan was a proxy battleground for the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. One could argue that America was the winner in that battle (the Soviet Union and Afghanistan certainly weren't), except that US actions then created the threat from the Taliban today. There were no winners.

America and the Soviet Union brought two other neighbors into that Cold War fight: Pakistan and India. India stood by the Soviet Union as it quietly did in many other areas. Pakistan and its intelligence service became the middleman between the United States and the mujahedeen (later to form the Taliban).

When Soviet forces pulled out in 1989, Pakistan continued to support the rebels; India supported the forces that years later became the North Alliance. Now, 15 years later , the battle over influence in Afghanistan has not stopped. India is working on hearts and minds, opening consulates and providing over $750 million in infrastructure and training support, while Pakistan is trying to bridge the hostility existing since the Afghan and Pakistan governments ended up on different sides. And so the proxy war continues with a different cast.

There is more to this unacknowledged war than merely emotion and history. As long as India and Pakistan remain hostile to each other , Afghanistan is strategically important to both. It is vital to Pakistan that it not have unfriendly powers on both its east (India) and west (Afghanistan) borders, just as from India's perspective, Afghanistan would provide a good strategic high-ground to squeeze Pakistan. Economically, too, Afghanistan holds great promise. The United States last year tied Afghanistan and Pakistan together through the creation of Reconstruction Opportunity Zones along their mutual border which would get American tax exemptions. Afghanistan also is the l inch pin of the trade routes and energy pipelines to Central Asia. So, if the United States is going to reverse this sad decline in Afghanistan, it will need the support of both India and Pakistan. These two great nations should learn from past mistakes -- fighting over Afghanistan is not the solution. The costs are too great for all parties. The United States and Afghanistan need to find ways to invest both nations in helping to make this country a success; they clearly need all the help they can get.

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