U.S. concedes Iraq victims were law-abiding, not insurgents

By Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers, July 27, 2008

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military said Sunday that the three people killed last month after U.S. soldiers shot at their car in one of the most secured areas of Iraq were civilians, not criminals as the military initially reported.

The correction came more than a month after a bank manager at a branch inside the airport, Hafeth Aboud Mahdi, and two female bank employees were shot at by U.S. soldiers as they sped to work on a road within the secured airport compound. The road is used only by people with high-level security clearance badges. The car veered off the road, hit a concrete blast wall and burst into flames.

The original statement said that Mahdi and the two women were "criminals" and that an American convoy on the side of the secured road came under small-arms fire from the vehicle. Soldiers said they shot back. A weapon was found in the debris and two U.S. military vehicles were struck by bullets from the attack, the statement on June 25 said.

"When we are attacked, we will defend ourselves and will use deadly force if necessary," Maj. Joey Sullinger, a spokesman for 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, said in a statement at the time. "Such attacks endanger not only U.S. soldiers but also innocent civilians, including women and children, traveling the roadways of Baghdad."

On Sunday the story changed and the tone was apologetic. A military statement said that neither the civilians who were killed nor the soldiers were at fault for the deaths. An investigation found that "the driver and passengers were law-abiding citizens of Iraq."

Soldiers had pulled off the road because one of the vehicles in the convoy was having maintenance problems. As they worked on the vehicle they saw Mahdi's car and thought it was moving too quickly toward them, the statement said. Believing they might be in danger, the soldiers warned the car. When the driver ignored the signals they shot at the vehicle, the statement said.

The alleged attack and the weapon that was said to have been recovered from the burned vehicle were misunderstandings, the statement said.

"This was an extremely unfortunate and tragic incident," said Col. Allen Batschelet, chief of staff, MND-B and 4th Infantry Division, in a statement. "Our deepest regrets of sympathy and condolences go out to the family. We are taking several corrective measures to amend and eliminate the possibility of such situations happening in the future."

Mahdi's son, Mohammed Hafeth, said the statement was insufficient.

He said the image of his father's burning vehicle haunts him. He'd waited in his father's office that morning surprised that he wasn't there yet. They'd left at nearly the same time that morning.

Hafeth drives bank employees to work. That morning his father offered to take one of Hafeth's passengers and picked up another female bank employee who lived nearby their central Baghdad home.

As he sat in the office a colleague walked in and told Hafeth his father's car was broken down on the airport road. Hafeth reached for his car keys.

"I'll drive," he recalled his colleague saying.

As they approached his father's car he saw the flames. He jumped from the car and started to run toward the burning vehicle, but U.S. soldiers blocked his way.

"Go," he recalled them ordering. But he said he couldn't move. He dropped to the ground and wept as his father burned inside the vehicle.

"Why did they kill him like this?" Mohammed Hafeth said Sunday in a phone interview. "We demand that they send those soldiers to an Iraqi and American court."

Mahdi was the father of six, including Hafeth. Hafeth said he now shoulders the financial responsibility for his family on his approximately $100-a-month salary.

"I was shocked that my father was killed by the Americans," he said. "Supposedly we move in a secured area ... we used to wave at them and they waved at us."

Hafeth said he didn't accept the compensation offered by the U.S. military. They offered $10,000, he said, and that wasn't enough for his father's car let alone his father's life.

"My father was a peaceful man," he said. "He never did anything wrong. Everybody knew his good reputation and everybody liked him."

McClatchy Special Correspondent Laith Hammoudi contributed to this report.

McClatchy Newspapers 2008

Time To Exit The Empire Game

By Patrick J. Buchanan | WorldNetDaily, July 25, 2008

As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, Lee's retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur's retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947 – and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued.

France's departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds of thousands of faithful Algerians to the FALN disgraceful. Few American can forget the humiliation of Saigon '75, or the boat people, or the Cambodian holocaust.

Strategic retreats that turn into routs are often the result of what Lord Salisbury called "the commonest error in politics ... sticking to the carcass of dead policies."

From 1989 to 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the USSR, America had an opportunity to lay down its global burden and become again what Jeane Kirkpatrick called "a normal country in a normal time."

We let the opportunity pass by, opting instead to use our wealth and power to convert the world to democratic capitalism. And we have reaped the reward of all the other empires that went before: a sinking currency, relative decline, universal enmity, a series of what Rudyard Kipling called "the savage wars of peace."

Yet, opportunity has come anew for America to shed its imperial burden and become again the republic of our fathers.

The chairman of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Party has just been hosted for six days by Beijing. Commercial flights have begun between Taipei and the mainland. Is not the time ripe for America to declare our job done, that the relationship between China and Taiwan is no longer a vital interest of the United States?

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government wants a status of forces agreement with a timetable for full withdrawal of U.S. troops. Is it not time to say yes, to declare that full withdrawal is our goal as well, that the United States seeks no permanent bases in Iraq?

On July 4, Reuters, in a story headlined "Poland rejects U.S. missile offer," reported from Warsaw: "Poland spurned as insufficient on Friday a U.S. offer to boost its air defenses in return for basing anti-missile interceptors on its soil. ...

"'We have not reached a satisfactory result on the issue of increasing the level of Polish security,' Prime Minister Donald Tusk told a news conference after studying the latest U.S. proposal."

Tusk is demanding that America "provide billions of dollars worth of U.S. investment to upgrade Polish air defenses in return for hosting 10 two-stage missile interceptors," said Reuters.

Reflect if you will on what is going on here.

By bringing Poland into NATO, we agreed to defend her against the world's largest nation, Russia, with thousands of nuclear weapons. Now, the Polish regime is refusing us permission to site 10 anti-missile missiles on Polish soil, unless we pay Poland billions for the privilege.

Has Uncle Sam gone senile?

No. Tusk has Sam figured out. The old boy is so desperate to continue in his Cold War role as world's Defender of Democracy he will even pay the Europeans – to defend Europe.

Why not tell Tusk that if he wants an air defense system, he can buy it; that we Americans are no longer willing to pay Poland for the privilege of defending Poland; that the anti-missile missile deal is off. And use cancellation of the missile shield to repair relations with a far larger and more important power, Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Consider, too, the opening South Korea is giving us to end our 60-year commitment to defend her against the North. For weeks, Seoul hosted anti-American protests against a trade deal that allows U.S. beef into South Korea. Koreans say they fear mad-cow disease.

Yet, when a new deal was cut to limit imports to U.S. beef from cattle less than 30 months old, that too was rejected by the protesters. Behind the demonstrations lies a sentiment of anti-Americanism.

In 2002, a Pew Research Center survey of 42 nations found 44 percent of South Koreans, second highest number of any country, holding an unfavorable view of the United States. A Korean survey put the figure at 53 percent, with 80 percent of youth holding a negative view. By 39 percent to 35 percent, South Koreans saw the United States as a greater threat than North Korea.

Can someone explain why we keep 30,000 troops on the DMZ of a nation whose people do not even like us?

The raison d'etre for NATO was the Red Army on the Elbe. It disappeared two decades ago. The Chinese army left North Korea 50 years ago. Yet NATO endures and the U.S. Army stands on the DMZ. Why?

Because, if all U.S. troops were brought home from Europe and Korea, 10,000 rice bowls would be broken. They are the rice bowls of politicians, diplomats, generals, journalists and think tanks who would all have to find another line of work.

And that is why the Empire will endure until disaster befalls it, as it did all the others.

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.

Europe's Hypocrisy

Why Bush Must be Put in the Dock

By BRENDAN COONEY | Counterpunch, 26 / 27 July, 2008

It seems strange for European leaders to be celebrating the capture of a war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, so soon after they were shaking hands with another, who so far has not had to go through the trouble of growing out his hair and selling new-age medicine.

"This is a historic moment," German Chancellor Andrea Merkel said of the arrest of the Serbian, whose body count is thought to be upwards of 10,000. "The victims must know: massive human rights violations will not go unpunished."

Two weeks earlier she had "a very interesting exchange of view" with George Bush, whose body count is thought to be upwards of half a million and counting. There was no mention of reassurances for his victims.

The Karadzic seizure "underscored Serbia's European calling," Merkel said, just a fortnight after she had a greater criminal by the right hand and let him get away.

But wait a minute, you say. Karadzic killed systematically. He targeted innocent people. He killed people because of their ethnicity. Shouldn't this be factored into our judgment of him? Maybe. Or maybe killing civilians is killing civilians. Maybe the fact that you don't do body counts, that you slaughtered so many people so indiscriminately that there is no way to precisely tabulate the number, should be weighed as well.

Whether having people lined up before shooting them should carry a different moral valence from dropping bombs on them is a consideration that might be brought up at the International Criminal Court of the United Nations.

There is no reason the International Criminal Court should not adjudicate prima facie cases of aggressive wars. It was wars of aggression, after all, that Nuremberg's International Military Tribunal found "evil." A war of aggression, it said, is "not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." It was Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, who coined the phrase supreme international crime.

The first four of the seven Nuremberg Principles, adopted in 1950, are a seminal attempt to hold individuals accountable for their actions within the larger system of the nation-state: Principle 1 holds that the individual is responsible for his war crimes; Principle 2 says you're not off the hook just because what you did was okay by the laws of your country; Principle 3 posits that acting as head of state is no defense, and Principle 4 says that following orders is not a defense either.

So what's an international crime? The Principles lay out three kinds: crimes against peace (such as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression"), war crimes ("murder," "ill-treatment of prisoners of war," "plunder of public or private property," "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages"), and crimes against humanity ("murder...and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population.")

If we are to mean anything at all as a nation, we must hold the Iraq War up to the light of these principles. We must let an international court decide which of these crimes were committed by whom, and we must hold accountable the individuals responsible for this war.

The Nuremberg trials were open to two main critiques from contemporary observers: they smacked of victor's justice, because the Allies were not tried for their war crimes, and they were based on ex post facto laws (devised after the crimes were committed). Both points have their validity. And yet putting Bush and company on trial is immune from both charges, because the Principles have been in place for 60 years now, and it is not a question of hauling the vanquished before the victorious. This is the perfect opportunity to establish that no nation is above international law.

Here at home, people are finally starting to talk about impeachment, now that the Administration is in its gloaming. But impeaching Bush is like discharging Timothy McVeigh from the military or kicking Jeffrey Dahmer out of the Boy Scouts. It's something we should probably do while we're waiting for the guy to be arrested.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review of March 28, 1971, Times reporter Neil Sheehan argued that the U.S. presidents, generals and advisers who had launched the war of aggression in Southeast Asia should be put on trial. "The cleansing of the nation's conscience and the future conduct of the most powerful country in the world towards the weaker peoples of the globe demand a national inquiry into the war crimes question," he wrote. "History shows that men who decide for war, as the Japanese militarists did, cannot demand mercy for themselves. The resort to force is the ultimate act."

What defense would we hear from lawyers for the Bush Administration and his henchmen (or puppeteers, let the evidence determine)? That the Iraq War was self-defense? One argument for putting Bush and Cheney in the dock of an international court is that judges there might not swallow that line as easily as did the U.S. press and public.

Brendan Cooney is an anthropologist living in New York City. He can be reached at: itmighthavehappened@yahoo.com

The war, the war criminals and the law

Dr George Barnsby, July 26, 2008

The scenario that Gordon Brown and his New Labour cabinet paint for themselves is pure bunkum and it revolves around the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now at an end. This moment occurred when five British hostages were taken. Brown now has only two alternatives. He can try to continue the war when he will find that every British life is a virtual hostage or he can bring the troops home and accept reality.

The other aspect of reality is that Brown and all who have waged war illegally are war criminals stained with the blood of the innocent. And once a war criminal always a war criminal. George Monbiot was the first to test this truth when he attempted to make a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton at the Hay Festival. In many countries now their constitutions do not permit of war criminals remaining at large and this is the significance of another attempted citizen’s arrest this week in New Zealand where students offer support for anyone making a citizen’s arrest of Condoleezza Rice the US Secretary of State. George W. Bush himself came close to a citizen’s arrest on his recent visit to Britain and had to be protected by British police from anyone getting near to him. It is now quite clear that there is a large body of opinion in America in favour of Bush being arraigned before the Court of Human Rights at the Hague charged with Crimes against Humanity and it becomes more evident every day that this wiill be where he lands up.

Returning to Blair, Gordon Brown and the diminishing tribe of New Labourites, it is clear that as Britain disintegrates there will be an urgent need for an English constitution which will raise the question of what to do with war criminals. In this regard Britain’s record is a poor one. In 1945 it allowed to enter Britain Nazi collaborators, war criminals and concentration camp guards from Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and elsewhere. Not a single collaborator was ever tried. The idea of Brown being free for another two years is ludicrous and I hope a citizen’s arrest will be made in public by one of my favourite MPs, George Galloway or Ken Purchase. And locally perhaps me arresting my friend Rob Marris who continues to support the war in Iraq when most rational people know that it is all over.

NATO states agree to send more forces to Afghanistan

The Peninsula, July 27, 2008

Source ::: Reuters

KABUL • NATO countries have agreed to send more troops to the volatile south of Afghanistan, Canada’s foreign minister said yesterday, and another 200 Canadian troops could also be deployed.

Canada has some 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them stationed in the southern province of Kandahar where they have suffered one of the worst casualty rates fighting a resilient Taliban insurgency.

“We’ve been talking with our NATO allies and in fact we do now have commitments to increase the number of troops particularly in the Kandahar region,” Canadian Foreign Minister David Emerson told a news conference in Kabul.

“We’re really more comforted that the troop support is being increased in an appropriate way,” he said.

Canadian soldiers first came to Afghanistan in late 2001 as part of a US-led Afghan mission to overthrow the hardline Taliban. In 2006, Canadian troops took over operations in Kandahar, the Taliban’s former de-facto capital. Faced with some of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan, Canada has criticised other countries for refusing to send troops to the south, where the insurgency is strongest.

Asked if Canada was going to increase its own contingent in Afghanistan, Emerson said it could send some 200 soldiers.

“Canada does have 2,500 troops here in Afghanistan and that number could expand to 2,700 as more equipment arrives,” he said.

“We are really talking about a significant increase in the contribution from other countries and that contribution has been forthcoming,” he said.

Emerson, on his first trip to Afghanistan since taking office in May, said he had visited “his team” in Kandahar and Kabul to ensure they were well organised.

Asked if more troops were the only solution in Afghanistan, Emerson said there needed to be a more “complete reconciliation”.

“But it is going to take some military capacity and military activity to get Afghanistan to the point where a more comprehensive, a more permanent solution can take effect,” he said.

The Scourge of the IMF

Published on Friday, July 25, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

by Robert Weissman

Tuberculosis, a treatable disease, kills 1.7 million people a year worldwide.

TB incidence, according to the World Health Organization seems to be correlated to broad social factors, like access to clean water and sanitation, HIV incidence and national health expenditures.

A just published study in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine investigates the role of different possible explanatory factor: the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The researchers’ study focuses on the period 1991 to 2003 for the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a region for which there is robust data.

The results: The researchers concluded “that IMF economic reform programs are strongly associated with rises in tuberculosis mortality rates in post-communist Eastern European and FSU [former Soviet Union] countries, even after correcting for potential selection bias, tuberculosis surveillance infrastructure, levels of economic development, urbanization, and HIV/AIDS.”

“We estimated an increase in tuberculosis mortality rates when countries participate in an IMF program, which was much greater than the reduction that would have been expected had the countries not participated in an IMF program. On the other hand, we estimated a decrease in tuberculosis mortality rates associated with exiting an IMF program.”

In other words: When countries entered IMF programs, TB rates went up. When the programs ended and countries escaped from IMF influence, TB rates went down.

OK, but the region was in chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. Economies crashed and per capita income plummeted. Crime rose, incarceration rates jumped, HIV spread. Aren’t these the real factors behind rising TB rates?

Explains Sanjay Basu of Yale University, one of the study authors: “First of all, not all of these countries in this region were dependent on the former Soviet Union. Many of them actually had an increase in GDP after the fall of the former Soviet Union. Several were not part of the trading bloc. And in some of the key countries where TB rates rose, we actually saw an increase in economic growth. So economic downturns could not explain, as the WHO itself has stated, the trends of tuberculosis in that regions. Something else was going on.”

“The reason we use such heavy statistics is precisely to factor in these other issues — incarceration, HIV, changes to the economy, changes to the healthcare infrastructure. We found a statistically independent effect of the IMF. That’s not to say that the IMF was the only cause of TB in this region. The economy, incarceration, HIV — these are all very important, but those factors could not fully explain TB in the region.”

(An interview with Basu can be found here.)

The PLoS study found that participating in an IMF program correlated with increases in tuberculosis incidence of 13.9 percent and an increase in TB mortality rates of 16.6 percent. Basu says that, if the study results are valid, they suggest “we would have averted tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of new cases” if countries in the region had never entered IMF programs.

The theory of the study authors is that IMF programs drive down healthcare spending, and this reduced investment in healthcare explains the rise in TB incidence and death. Basu emphasizes, correctly, that the issue is not so much the IMF directing countries to spend less on health. Rather, it imposes a set of policy constraints — including overall limits on government spending, and needlessly low inflation targets — that inevitably result in countries spending less on health.

There are always variations between regions, but there is nothing about the PLoS researchers’ story that suggests things are any different in Africa, the region where the IMF now exerts the most influence.

Not surprisingly, the IMF has rejected the PLoS findings. “Severe methodological shortcomings limit the scope of these results and prevent any causal interpretation,” asserts an IMF response that is much more subdued than comments from spokespeople. “The fundamental problem is that this study does not take properly into account that countries implement IMF-supported reforms in times of economic distress.”

Says the IMF response: “The authors do not take into account that the economic and social instability following the collapse of Soviet Union may have had a direct impact on TB incidence in the 21 transition economies considered in the study.”

The problem with this line of argument is that it is not true. The authors did take the economic and social instability into account.

Can anything be done about IMF policies with such harmful impacts?

Yes. The IMF is a human creation, not a force of nature.

The United States Congress will next year have a unique opportunity to influence IMF policy. The IMF needs approval from the Congress to go ahead with plans to sell some of the gold it controls. This gold would be used to fund the IMF’s administrative costs — a new income stream the IMF desperately needs. Interest payments from middle-income countries previously paid for administrative costs, but these countries have paid back their loans in order to escape from IMF influence.

As the U.S. Congress looks to approve gold sales to finance the IMF, it must insist that the IMF first end the mandates that effectively restrict countries’ health spending, and force borrowing countries to implement a discredited market fundamentalist policy agenda.

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and director of Essential Action.

(c) Robert Weissman

Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?

By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, July 25, 2008

"On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs." - Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.

Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: "I am a Zionist." Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.

Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.

Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.

Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer's recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel's opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: "The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality."

Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.

In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.

In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.

The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as "visitors in their own city."

Continued . . .