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February 26, 2006

The Gulags Multiply

Let's say you skip over the cruel, immoral, and illegal aspects of these prisons.

But, please tell me which brainiac thinks this is an effective strategy against the possibility of terrorist attacks against homeland U.S.A?

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.

While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

Posted by zeynep at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2006

A Scary Turning Point

The attack on the Askariya shrine has finally managed what massive bombings of markets, schools, funerals had not -- some Shi'ite militants have turned around and attacked Sunni mosques, killing at least a dozen.

This may well be the scary turning point that the Salafi fundamentalists have been trying to achieve for so long. And it is not good for U.S. plans for the region -- it's been clear for some time that Zalmay Khalilzad has been trying, successfully for a change, to isolate some portions of the insurgency in return for more power to the Sunni leadership.

While this may bad it may be for the United States long-term plans for the region, it is a terrible turning point for the people of Iraq. The long-forecast civil war may yet spark, and if it does, the blood that had flown until known will possibly seem like merely a trickle.

Posted by zeynep at 09:57 PM | Comments (2)

February 19, 2006

Batman to the Rescue...

Great. We already have an administration that thinks its own fiction has the same status as facts. Artists should be careful not confuse them any further. (How long before Batman makes an appearance in a TV ad)?

Posted by zeynep at 09:35 PM | Comments (1)

February 18, 2006

A week goes by ...

A week went by, and I still couldn't find the time to write any lengthy posts. In the meantime, a new batch of torture pictures from Abu Ghraib were released -- and barely noted in mainstream press. At least a dozen people were killed in the cartoon riots -- but, guess what? They were all protestors. The implications of that point is also last on the many, many op-eds that continue to complain about harm done to "us" because of the cartoons.

Posted by zeynep at 10:16 AM | Comments (1)

February 10, 2006

Back...

Couldn't post for a few days, but now I'm back. I intend to write about the "cartoon" debacle. But this caught my eye. The world is at a warmest point for the past millenium.

Why is this not an emergency, again?

Posted by zeynep at 09:30 PM | Comments (2)

February 05, 2006

Why Stop at Pakistan?

Well, you could see this coming:

In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush's surveillance program. During the briefing, said administration and Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.

Posted by zeynep at 10:05 AM | Comments (2)

February 04, 2006

"The president has decided that we can whack someone without the approval or knowledge of the host government"

We will shoot whomever, whenever, wherever. We won't even keep track of how many people or who we killed. We won't talk to the sovereign governments in question. We will then call ourselves civilized and others rogue states.

'Targeted killing' with missile-firing Predators is a way to hit Al Qaeda in remote areas, officials say. Host nations are not always given notice. ..

Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized Al Qaeda, U.S. officials say.

Several U.S. officials confirmed at least 19 occasions since Sept. 11 on which Predators successfully fired Hellfire missiles on terrorist suspects overseas, including 10 in Iraq in one month last year. The Predator strikes have killed at least four senior Al Qaeda leaders, but also many civilians, and it is not known how many times they missed their targets.

Critics of the program dispute its legality under U.S. and international law, and say it is administered by the CIA with little oversight. U.S. intelligence officials insist it is one of their most tightly regulated, carefully vetted programs.

...

High-ranking U.S. and allied counter-terrorism officials said the program's expansion was not merely geographic. They said it had grown from targeting a small number of senior Al Qaeda commanders after the Sept. 11 attacks to a more loosely defined effort to kill possibly scores of suspected terrorists, depending on where they were found and what they were doing.

"We have the plans in place to do them globally," said a former counter-terrorism official who worked at the CIA and State Department, which coordinates such efforts with other governments.

"In most cases, we need the approval of the host country to do them. However, there are a few countries where the president has decided that we can whack someone without the approval or knowledge of the host government."

Add that to the list of answers to "why do they hate us." We keep behaving like this all we are doing is increasing the number of people who hate us. And, again, even if we consider the question purely strategically --let alone the obvious immorality and the illegality of the program--, it is more than highly dubious. So what even if we kill one or two prominent members of Al-Qaeda? Which such behaviour on our parts, they will have no difficulty recruiting many, many more.

Also, check this out from Lee Strickland, "a former CIA counsel who retired in 2004 from the agency's Senior Intelligence Service":

Strickland, like some other officials, said the Predator program served as a deterrent to foreign governments, militias and other groups that might be harboring Al Qaeda cells.

"You give shelter to Al Qaeda figures, you may well get your village blown up," Strickland said. "Conversely, you have to note that this can also create local animosity and instability."

Mr. Strickland, that's called collective punishment and it is a war crime. But, hey, that doesn't apply to us now, does it.

Posted by zeynep at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2006

SOTU

It was surreal. He just kept lying, on the warrantless wiretapping (it is not court-approved, although who knows now with the deck stacked), his energy policy, reconstruction (there is no new reconstruction money)... It was almost boring, too. If the stakes weren't deadly serious.

Here's a SOTU rebuttal that can be printed and shared.

Posted by zeynep at 07:18 AM | Comments (1)