The War On Terror my ass, continued

1. The Perception Gap
The War on Terror, as Others See It
By NORMAN SOLOMON

The USA's mass media constantly tell us how Americans see the "war on terror." But the same outlets rarely tell us much about how the rest of the world sees it.

Five years after 9/11, the gap between perceptions is enormous. Countless polls confirm the overall chasm. Yet, day to day, the media messages that surround us in the United States simply recycle American views for American viewers, listeners and readers.

But there are exceptions. A recent one aired on "PRI's The World," a co-production of Public Radio International, WGBH in Boston and the BBC World Service. "We decided to check in with people in different parts of the globe to get their perspectives on the White House's war on terror," the anchor said on the Sept. 5 broadcast.

And for the next six minutes, the American audience got an earful -- from four speakers who were not just expressing their own views. Crucially, they were summing up the dominant outlooks in huge regions of the planet.

The most sympathetic view of the U.S. "war on terrorism" came from a senior manager with Ernst & Young Security and Integrity Services, based in the Netherlands. He said: "The Europeans are still somewhat confused about what the focus of the war is. They see a lack of clarity from the United States as to what the goals of this conflict are, as to what the strategy is, as to what the standards are that the U.S. applies, and as to what the controls are that the U.S. has placed on itself in waging this war."

By U.S. media standards, that's about the extent of mainstream critiques of the "war on terror." But outside the United States, that's about the mildest criticism you're likely to find.

Consider the assessment that aired on the radio program from Rohan Gunaratna, author of the widely praised book "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." Based in Singapore, he was principal investigator for the United Nations' Terrorism Prevention Branch.

In Asia, said Gunaratna, "the vast majority of the Muslims believe that President Bush's campaign against terrorism has in fact increased the threat of terrorism and extremism very significantly after 9/11. With regard to Iraq, what they're saying is that the terrorists have recruited more people, radicalized more people and raised funds from Muslims just by projecting U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as an attack against Islam and as an attack against the Muslims."

Then came the assessment from Frank Njenga, a psychiatrist in Nairobi, who is president of the African Association of Psychiatrists and Allied Professionals. "The White House war on terrorism is generally viewed here in Kenya as a futile exercise that is exacerbating the insecurity across the world," Dr. Njenga said. "It is perceived from this end that the major perpetrators of terrorism in the world are the inequities that exist in the world -- economic, social and political. Those people who believe that they are downtrodden will continue to perpetuate acts of terrorism."

And, Dr. Njenga added, "It is generally perceived that America has a major role to play in this inequitable distribution of resources across the world. In fact, the general perception is that the average American has no understanding, has no intention, has no will to understand anything that happens outside of the United States -- and for that reason their war on terrorism is a total misconception without any relevance to the real world where the majority of the people live."

What about the predominant view from the Middle East? Rami G. Khouri is director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large at the Daily Star newspaper, which is published throughout the region. On the radio segment, he said: "The American war on terror is perceived in Lebanon and much of the Middle East as a sign of the combination of arrogance and confusion that is driving American policy, not only in the Middle East but I think in much of the world."

What Khouri had to say, few American pundits seem to want to hear: "While there's agreement that terror is a problem that must be fought -- and we have suffered from it much more than the United States has, we in this region in the Middle East -- there's also a sense that the United States has mis-diagnosed the nature of the terror problem, exaggerated its threat, confused hopelessly a whole range of different groups, some of which are terrorists, some of which are doing legitimate resistance to occupation -- and basically tried to come up with a new formula that substitutes for the cold war."

Lest there be any misunderstanding, Khouri added: "The United States calls 'terrorists' anybody that it doesn't like or that Israel doesn't like, because people like Hezbollah and Hamas who are fighting a war of resistance against Israeli occupation are labeled as 'terrorists,' while most of the world sees them as legitimate resistance fighters when they're fighting the Israeli army."

Such views are routinely expressed in news media almost everywhere in the world. But in the United States, our media insulation about the "war on terror" is extreme -- and dangerously self-deluding.

(The paperback edition of Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," was published this summer.)


2. Here's a piece by an Arab, who seems to know the US better than we do ourselves.
Apocalypse now: the global war on terror and its principal players is but a scene from the historical development of globalisation the West has championed
By Azmi Bishara (from Al-Ahram Weekly Online http://weekly.ahram.org.eg)

The twin towers of the World Trade Centre may have once cropped up in the minds of America's enemies, but thinking about something and acting on an idea are two entirely different things. To imagine hijacking a plane is one thing; to actually hijack one is something else. Worlds apart from this is to plan for years and to take flying lessons so that one day you can pilot a commercial airline and steer it, full of passengers, straight into a skyscraper, and, moreover, do this in perfect synchronisation with four other groups of hijackers aiming for other targets elsewhere. This was the nature of the operation carried out against the only country in history to have dropped nuclear bombs on people in cities. It was intended as a strike against the heart of imperialism. But had any rational person contemplated the possible consequences, he would never have brought himself to do it. This is not just because of the immense destructive power unleashed as the planes hit the buildings, but also because it gave the US opportunity to divide the world as it saw fit, turning sophisticated imperialist theories into self- fulfilling prophecies regarding the confrontation of civilisations.

I doubt the people who carried out 9/11 realised that they would render an entire Arab generation hostage to psychopathic aggressiveness amid the ultimate metaphysical struggle of good and evil. But if you are among those inclined to believe that those who carried out the appalling hijack attacks, not far from the UN headquarters, are themselves one of the products and many faces of globalisation, then you realise how tragically laden the world is with symbols and symbolism. While 9/11 and the "war on terror" was soon globalised, divisions proliferated also. Perhaps one of the most dangerous consequences of 11 September is that the polarisation between opposing fundamentalisms has shunted aside the thoughtful and constructive quest for the welfare and happiness of all human societies, and of human beings as individuals and as exponents of diverse cultures that are not in adversarial relationships or hierarchically juxtaposed on the basis of some notion of good or bad.

The events of 9/11 coincided with an American administration inspired and shaped by three ideological sources. The first is conservative Republican pragmatists who have characterised Republican administrations since Nixon and Reagan. Anti-liberal at home and hawkish and interventionist abroad, their erstwhile enemy was communism, but after this faded away in the time of Bush Sr and Clinton, 9/11 came along to substitute for Reagan's "Evil Empire".

The neoconservatives form the current administration's second mainstay. A product of the post-Cold War era, they are not conservative but radical, in the sense that they ground and carry out their conservative beliefs in revolutionary theory and practice. They advocate the export of democracy and values they regard as universal, but in reality use these as tools to attain global dominion. They call for liberation from the "status quo", under which America had propped up non-democratic governments in order to bolster the capitalist camp against the socialist one, on the grounds that this policy is no longer justified. They also hold that America should shed its inhibitions against acting as an empire. It has the might to perform its duty as the world's policeman and, therefore, should do so with confidence. They further oppose cultural relativism, which both democrats and conservative pragmatists subscribe to, if for different reasons, except when it comes to politics and culture in the Arab and Islamic world.

The third ideological pillar of this administration is the fundamentalist evangelical church, the bulwark of what they regard as America's protestant identity and values against the encroachment of liberalism and the degenerate culture of the western and eastern seaboards. An increasingly influential trend in the evangelical church is the Christian Zionists, especially with regards to shaping American foreign policy. They have forged a political theology in accordance with which America's mission abroad is to promote the fulfilment of literalist interpretations of apocalyptic scripture, a mission that they have wed to a Jewish Zionist colonialist theology founded upon different readings of the Old Testament as far as the promised land, a new Jerusalem and the coming of the messiah are concerned. Because of the centrality of Israel to the "second coming" and their concept of salvation, Christian Zionists are more fanatically pro-Israeli than Israelis. And in the fervour of their conviction, they regard Israel's opponents as their mortal enemies, and, therefore, demonise Islam and the Prophet and openly incite hatred against Arabs and Muslims.

The "war against terrorism," "Those who aren't with us are against us," and other such headings for the post-9/11 political climate are the product of the interaction between the three ideological sources above. In fact, they are about the only basis for the convergence between trends that would otherwise have very little in common. After all, nothing would bring the neoconservatives -- most of whom are secular liberals when it comes to the separation between church and state and many of whom are Jews -- together with extremist fundamentalist Christians apart from their hostility to Islam and their advocacy of the "war on terror" as a means to lash out against Islamic countries and organisations that they regard as hostile to Israel. Nor would a conservative pragmatist feel any great enthusiasm for a war against organisations like Al-Qaeda if that war were not ultimately aimed at eliminating regimes that stood in the way of America's political hegemony over the region and its control over the world's major oil resources.

Anybody with half a mind knows that conventional military means will not succeed against youths who are prepared to sacrifice their lives anywhere in the world as long as their death acquires meaning by causing harm to America. Aircraft carriers, missile bombardment, landing forces, and occupying troops don't stand a chance against this phenomenon. There is no place to take this youth on, no battle theatre where standing armies can clash, nor even that more nebulous arena of guerrilla warfare. But the Americans were bent on engaging this enemy in combat, as a result of which they ended up fighting countries that had no relationship with terrorism and may have themselves even been victims of terrorism before the US. The Americans found themselves pursuing old agendas under new headings, in the course of which they only succeeded in weakening national governments and causing the very phenomenon they were supposedly fighting to proliferate and take root in areas it had never existed before.

They also succeeded in promoting the fulfilment of those self-fulfilling prophecies by turning culture, religion and identity politics into the theatre of confrontation. In the 1970s, the Arab world saw the rise of new militant Islamist movements, some of which had even begun to condemn their own governments and societies as heretic. Yet although these movements regarded holy war as a fundamental religious duty -- rejecting national boundaries and allegiances as secularist and hence pagan -- they were very much the product of their local environments. The phenomenon played out in New York, London, Madrid and Bali, on the other hand, is of a completely different order. This universalised holy war could only have emerged in the context of and as part of the process of globalisation.

In the case of globalised violence against the US and the West, the Al-Qaeda "brand" is the other face of McDonalds, Coca Cola and other franchises for the distribution of consumerist democracy and Hollywood culture. It would have been impossible to conceive of internationalised organisations setting themselves quixotic global missions against the West and latter-day crusaders in the absence of cultural globalisation. The globalisation of culture precedes universal globalised nihilistic terrorism, which avails itself of the very material means of globalisation: the Internet, live broadcasting, the mass production, distribution and export of political/religious items (in the form of images and ideas, etc). All this is part and parcel of a process of globalisation that spreads consumer needs but not the means to pay for them; that spreads the values of democracy, freedom and justice but not the means to realise them; that spreads mass culture but not the sciences, the discoveries and the historical experiences of the cultures that came before it.

Little wonder, therefore, that America couldn't find what it was supposed to be fighting, since it was but a contorted mirror image of its own self.


3. The Long War: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Protracted Conflict -- and Defeat
By Michael Vlahos

Early this year America entered a third stage in the war that began on 9/11, when a new narrative for the conflict was unveiled: “The Long War.”

In war, narrative is much more than just a story. Narrative may sound like a fancy literary word, but it is actually the foundation of all strategy, upon which all else—policy, rhetoric, and action—is built. War narratives need to be identified and critically examined on their own terms, for they can illuminate the inner nature of the war itself.

War narrative does three essential things. First, it is the organizing framework for policy. Policy cannot exist without an interlocking foundation of “truths” that people easily accept because they appear to be self-evident and undeniable. Second, this “story” works as a framework precisely because it represents just such an existential vision. The “truths” that it asserts are culturally impossible to disassemble or even criticize. Third, having presented a war logic that is beyond dispute, the narrative then serves practically as the anointed rhetorical handbook for how the war is to be argued and described.

In the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review Report, the phrase is recurrent, with “long war”, “long, global war” or “long, irregular war” appearing 34 times, including the title for the first chapter: “Fighting the Long War.” The banner headline on the defenselink.mil announcing the report reads: “The United States is a Nation Engaged in What Will be a Long War.”

The Story of War, Twice Transformed

This war—the Global War on Terrorism, or gwot—has had three distinct “stories.” Or perhaps it would be better to say that the story of this war has been twice transformed. Its initial incarnation as a “war against terrorism” was a simple story of righteous retribution: kill the terrorists in their mountain lairs. The second began with the president’s declaration of an “Axis of Evil.” This represented a metamorphosis from “terrorist” enemy to the image of an evil league of enemy powers, and thus the entire significance of the war was elevated. At one rhetorical stroke it was now possible to assert a war narrative equal to the most protean of American struggles. The war could now be given a commanding meaning equal to the mythic claim of World War II itself. Thus it instantly became a grander enterprise, where the transformed narrative actually demanded great efforts and even greater events.

It is the collapse of this enterprise that has birthed yet another story. This third incarnation is a tortured response to debacle in Iraq, where messianic goals and millenarian promise went south. Thus the “Long War,” formally unveiled in Rumsfeld’s February 2006 speech to the National Press Club: “The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war.”

But the image of a long war—a dogged, “twilight struggle”—is not particularly attractive, especially if American failure and losses in Iraq are thus implicitly translated into a slow-bleeding vision of forever war. Such a picture certainly does not make the blood rush or the pulse race. To keep this effort up for “generations” as the president is fond of saying, the purpose driving this war must be great of course. But even more—and this is its greatest challenge—such purpose must explain the need for generations of pain and sacrifice.

As a template for the narrative of the “Long War”, World War II no longer works, since we continue to slog past anything like a v-j Day endpoint. The Long War needs, if such a thing is possible to imagine, a story of World War II-like significance, but with an even bigger claim on us. Thus in the president’s words, this war is “the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history.” The enemy is not only powerful, a “great evil”, it is also, a “mortal danger to all humanity”, the “enemy of civilization”—as though these men were somehow the antithesis of human and, perhaps even, inhuman. The enemy is not only “evil” (a word invoked like a litany), it also wages “war on the idea of human progress itself.” Are not the “Islamofascists”, in the president’s words, the successor evil to “the struggle against communism in the last century?”

There is the clear suggestion here that without U.S. intervention, the radicals would succeed, and a Caliphate would reign. This is what the official Long War briefing says. If we explicitly fight “Islamofascists” we must just as explicitly oppose everyone who supports or even sympathizes with Muslim resistance—and who knows how many Muslims “sympathize” at some level: a third, the majority? We are determined to reform and rehabilitate degraded Arab and Persian worlds.

Already the narrative of the Long War has won over the faithful. Freerepublic.com is probably the biggest “red” community blog. Most talk on the war there moves quickly to declarations like: “History shows that wars only end with a totally defeated enemy otherwise they go on . . . Either Islam or us will quit in total destruction.” Or another: “Will it take an American Hiroshima to awaken the majority, to mobilize our masses against the Islamic quest of world domination?”

Moreover, pushing the mythic card to its fullest has worked in Washington politics. Its authority has trumped all opposition. Woe to Democrats (or even Republicans) who question the American mission in a great war. It has been narrative as fiat and law, and as fiat and law it has served this administration well.

Islam’s Counter-Narrative

The Long War—and its spectral subtext of a war of civilizations—clearly targets the American domestic audience. But what does it promise to achieve in the Muslim world? It has already achieved this: it has helped to recreate or, perhaps rather, resurface a deeply coded Muslim counter-narrative. This counter-narrative is also apocalyptic in nature, going back to Islam’s 7 th century origins. Today America takes on the role of great evil, of the Dajjal .By almost unwittingly becoming the “Dark Side” threatening Islam, the United States plays into the hands of the Takfiri cause by making us Islam’s enemy. Do Muslims think more kindly on us when AM-talk-boosters of the Long War, like Dennis Prager, relentlessly insist that America is in a fight to the finish with only 100 million Muslims ?

Moreover the Long War narrative threatens also to forever alienate civil Islamists. Non-violent—or even armed but non-Takfiri Muslim revolutionaries—are the umma’s essential change agents. But the Long War posits a black and white choice between secular (or at least, “moderate”) Muslims on one hand, and pure “Islamofascists” on the other. In this choice there is no place for non-Takfiri, more community-based Islamists in the American camp .

The great, lost opportunity of American hopes for reform in the Arab world was with non-violent Islamists. That opportunity has now been fully squandered. In societies ruled by tyrants, quietist Islamists had come to represent an alternative hope for their communities. But in our chosen Iraqi showcase we set about, perhaps unwittingly, to alienate the very Islamists on whom our successful rule relied. Now they identify themselves as resisters of American occupation. They have become a model of Muslim political resistance—but these are not Takfiri fighters, rather they are honest, committed Muslim authority. Such Islamist fighters represent a range of community resistance: from carefully quietist—like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood—to civil militias—like the Shi’a in Iraq and Hezbollah in Lebanon—even to groups at the margins of governance— like Hamas or the Somali Courts Union.

Through this alienation we also move a traditionally more passive majority—who are not necessarily Takfiri enthusiasts—closer in sympathy with resistance. In Muslim places currently under foreign occupation popular support for resistance runs very high. Such resistance begins to develop a civic dimension, as in the popularly elected Hamas, or the various community-based militias of Iraq and even Somalia. Thus resistance goes beyond Takfiri action and is moving into the realm of legitimate civic action.

At the same time, liberals in the Islamic world are now at risk of looking like collaborators. Since we have so strongly championed liberal Muslim reformers, we have equally put them at risk of being seen as our agents in helping to subvert Islam. We codified a nascent “collaborator” model through our extravagant and extra-official electoral support for Iyad Allawi—efforts rewarded by the miniscule vote he received. The “Cedar Revolution” is a media- backfire case in point—morphing as it did into an extended political coming-out party for Hizballah.

When we have sought to empower liberal politics in Iraq, we instantly also signified that they were anointed agents of the American Design. Like the “Mayor of Kabul”, they must scramble desperately to show their Islamist bona fides , all the while guarded by blond American (or South African) praetorians. Meanwhile, the entire Islamic world has seen to what extent the United States is truly interested in the “triumph of democracy.” Where is all the democratic reform among America’s “friends and allies in the region?” In Egypt, where a twenty-year emergency law was arbitrarily extended? The all-powerful Egyptian state now has 15,000 uncharged prisoners in the tender mercy of its jails. If magistrates protest, they, too, are thrown in prison. The 88 Muslim Brothers now in Parliament are becoming Egypt’s only democratic alternative. Throughout it all the U.S. government has almost nothing to say; but for more than thirty years it has had something to give: more than $2 billion every year to the Pharaoh’s regime.

In Bahrain, the 2001 “Dawn of Democracy” has turned out to be a false dawn. Their prince’s fear of Iran—thanks to what has been happening in Iraq—has led to a betrayal of reform. The reform fiction is emblazoned in gerrymandering so flagrant that a two-thirds Shi’a majority is legislatively disempowered. And in Saudi Arabia, reforms are going nowhere fast, and cannot be usefully encouraged by the United States, except at the ethereal margins of “public diplomacy.” The much-heralded Shura council is just so much eye candy for American consumption.

So, in the end, our dark narrative prevents us from distinguishing reform and resistance movements we can live with from groups we absolutely must destroy. The Long War narrative cannot conceive of legitimate Muslim resistance against tyranny (unless of course, like Lebanon or Iran, we are in favor of it first). Thus authentic resistance is automatically lumped with Takfiri evil.

Shining as True Apostates

And if the current Long War narrative is invoked in event of a war or armed clash with Iran, what may result? A Persian-American war could potentially elevate Iran’s standing even among a majority Sunni umma. Even now Muslims view Iran as the only nation-state that stands up to U.S. power. A conflict with Iran would fully consolidate Muslim hostility and the perception that America represents the evil force in the world—the Dajjal —directly threatening Islam’s very survival. Thus even Shi‘i Iran might—in this exceptional situation—represent itself as the leader of Muslim resistance against the dark force. Thus one of the consequences of a Persian-American war would be to divide the Muslim world between those who resist evil and those who collaborate with it. This means that the rulers of Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf princelings—U.S. “friends and allies” all—would now shine as true apostate traitors to Islam. They would be under enormous pressure: either to renounce their relationship with the Americans or risk internal collapse (from coup, civil war, insurgency). Either way we lose.

The Long War is a failed narrative because it does not describe actual reality. Reality tells a story of an America delivering change to the Muslim World, a force of creative destruction. If anything, this American-created reality only fires up the longstanding Muslim grand narrative of deliverance and restoration. Moreover, the Long War perversely elevates the Takfiri narrative by telling Muslims that we are the dark force that must be resisted.

The Long War is thus more than a failed narrative—it is a self-defeating narrative. It has prospered only because it speaks to a highly motivated domestic audience, i.e., the conservative base that remains the passionate heart of administration war policy.

There was an old theater in Montmartre that specialized in sensational and horrifying dramatic entertainments. It was called the Grand Guignol . It is a fitting name for the strategy-trumping, domestic political theater of our imperial court.

(Michael Vlahos is Principal Professional Staff at the National Security Analysis Department of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory)


4. Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush’s Support -- by ADAM LIPTAK

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.

The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.

But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.

“It’s a Jekyll and Hyde routine,” Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University , said of the administration’s dual approaches.

In effect, the administration is proposing to write into law a two-track system that has existed as a practical matter for some time.

So-called high-value detainees held by the C.I.A. have been subjected to tough interrogation in secret prisons around the world.

More run-of-the-mill prisoners held by the Defense Department have, for the most part, faced milder questioning, although human rights groups say there have been widespread abuses.

The new bill would continue to give the C.I.A. the substantial freedom it has long enjoyed, while the revisions to the Army Field Manual announced Wednesday would further restrict military interrogators.

The legislation would leave open the possibility that the military could revise its own standards to allow the harsher techniques.

John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California , Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official who helped develop the administration’s early legal response to the terrorist threat, said the bill would provide people on the front lines with important tools.

“When you’re fighting a new kind of war against an enemy we haven’t faced before,” Professor Yoo said, “our system needs to give flexibility to people to respond to those challenges.”

In June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda . The new bill would keep the courts from that kind of meddling, Professor Yoo said.

“There is a rejection of what the court did in Hamdan,” he said, “which is to try to judicially enforce the Geneva Conventions, which no court had ever tried to do before.”

Indeed, the proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. “The act makes clear,” it says in its introductory findings, “that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights.”

Though lawsuits will almost certainly be filed challenging the bill should it become law, most legal experts said Congress probably had the power to restrict the courts’ jurisdiction in this way.

The proposed legislation would provide retroactive immunity from prosecution to government agents who used harsh methods after the Sept. 11 attacks. And, as President Bush suggested on Wednesday, it would ensure that those techniques remain lawful.

“As more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical,” Mr. Bush said. “And having a C.I.A. program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.”

Mr. Bush said he had never authorized torture but indicated that aggressive interrogation techniques short of torture remained important tools in the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism.

“I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why,” he said. “If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe and lawful and necessary.”

A senior intelligence official said that the new legislation, if enacted, would make it clear that the techniques used by the C.I.A. on senior Qaeda members who had been held abroad in secret sites would not be prohibited and that interrogators who engaged in those practices both in the past and in the future would not face prosecution.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not discuss the techniques the agency had used or was prepared to use.

Other senior administration officials, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said there was no intention to undercut the interrogation rules in the new Army Field Manual, which does not include some of the most extreme techniques used on some suspected terrorists in American custody.

The intent of the legislation, they said, is to prevent the prosecution of interrogators under amendments to the War Crimes Act that were passed in the 1990’s.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bars, among other things, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” The administration says that language is too vague.

That is nonsense, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and a State Department official in the Clinton administration. “Outrages upon personal dignity is something like Abu Ghraib or parading our soldiers in Vietnam before the television cameras,” he said. “Unconstitutionally vague means you don’t know it when you see it.”

But the new legislation would interpret “outrages upon personal dignity” relatively narrowly, adopting a standard enacted last year in an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act proposed by Senator John McCain , Republican of Arizona. The amendment prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and refers indirectly to an American constitutional standard that prohibits conduct which “shocks the conscience.”

There is substantial room for interpretation, legal experts said, between Common Article 3’s strict prohibition of, for instance, humiliating treatment and the McCain amendment’s ban only on conduct that “shocks the conscience.”

The proposed legislation, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, “seems to be trying to surgically remove from our compliance with Geneva the section of Common Article 3 that deals with humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The net effect of the new legislation in the interrogation context, Professor Yoo said, is to allow the C.I.A. flexibility of the sort that the revisions to the Army Field Manual have denied to the Pentagon. The bill lets the C.I.A. “operate with a freer hand” than the Defense Department “in that space between the Army Field Manual and the McCain amendment,” he said.

Dean Koh said the administration’s new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world.

“Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else’s,” he said, “by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made.”

The bill proposed by the White House would also amend the War Crimes Act, which makes violations of Common Article 3 a felony. Those amendments are needed, the administration said, to provide guidance to American personnel.

The new legislation makes a list of nine “serious violations” of Common Article 3 federal crimes. The prohibited conduct includes torture, murder, rape, and the infliction of severe physical or mental pain. By implication, some legal experts said, the bill endorses the use of those interrogation techniques that are not mentioned.

The proposed legislation in any event represents a further retreat from international legal standards by an administration already hostile to them, some scholars said. “It’s strong evidence that this administration doesn’t accept international legal processes,’’ said Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University.


5. European watchdog calls for clampdown on CIA
Scathing attack on Bush, 'the King John of USA'
By Nicholas Watt & Suzanne Goldenberg (from the good old Guardian)

The head of Europe's human rights watchdog yesterday called for monitoring of CIA agents operating in Britain and other European countries, after President George Bush's admission that the US had detained terrorist suspects in secret prisons.

Terry Davis, secretary general of the Council of Europe, said CIA agents operating in Europe should be subject to the same rules as British agents working for MI5 and MI6.

"There is a need to deal with the conduct of allied foreign security services agents active on the territory of a council member state," Terry Davis said. "In the UK there is parliamentary scrutiny of the intelligence services but there is no parliamentary scrutiny of friendly foreign services. The UK should be in the lead on this issue."

As part of this process, diplomatic immunity should be reviewed. "Immunity should not mean impunity," he said.

Mr Davis also called for a ban on the transport of suspects in military aircraft. At the moment the prohibition applies only to civil aircraft.

The former British Labour MP was scathing about President Bush. "Why does the US need to keep people in secret prisons? I thought that was settled by Magna Carta. But King John is alive and well and running the USA.

"There is a smoking gun. We know where it is - it is in the hands of George Bush. His fingerprints are on the gun."

Mr Davis's remarks came as the man leading the Council of Europe's investigation into the secret CIA prisons dismissed Mr Bush's admission as "just one piece of the truth". In an attempt to step up pressure on the US and European governments to come clean on the prisons, the Swiss senator Dick Marty said: "There is more, much more, to be revealed."

Mr Bush said on Wednesday he ordered the transfer of 14 al-Qaida suspects from secret CIA jails to Guantánamo as a step to putting the men on trial. That revived concerns about torture and mistreatment of the detainees during their years in CIA custody, and the fairness of the military tribunals sought by the White House.

Human rights activists expect details of the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said to have been the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, and the other al-Qaida suspects held incommunicado will emerge now that they are at Guantánamo and able to meet their lawyers. Administration officials said yesterday that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, had assured the International Committee of the Red Cross it would have access to the prisoners and that discussions were under way to arrange meetings.

However, the administration also said yesterday it had no intention of satisfying European demands for fuller disclosure about the location of the secret prisons. "If the European countries want to continue to try to find out where the secret sites are, that is up to the Europeans," John Bellinger III, legal adviser to Ms Rice, told reporters.

He also argued, as has Ms Rice, that Europeans were to some extent complicit with the clandestine detention. "Information derived from questioning individuals was shared with European countries, and it was shared in a way that saved European lives." Washington also wants to use such secret jails in the future, Mr Bellinger said. "The president believes there needs to be a special programme if we capture an al-Qaida leader."

Mr Marty said he was not surprised by Mr Bush's disclosures. "This is no news for me," said Mr Marty, who claimed earlier this year that 14 European countries colluded with US intelligence in a "spider's web" of human rights abuses. "I have always been certain that these prisons existed, so I am not surprised."

Other senior figures in the Council of Europe, who plan to intensify their investigations into allegations that Romania and Poland played host to many of the prisoners, also criticised the US. Rene van der Linden, president of the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, said: "Our work has helped to flush out the dirty nature of this secret war which, we learn at last, has been carried out completely beyond any legal framework.

"Kidnapping people and torturing them in secret, however tempting the short-term gain may appear to be, is what criminals do, not democratic governments. In the long term, such practices create more terrorists and undermine the values we are fighting for."


6. Analysis: Terror war may need name change -- by Pamela Hess

The United States should rethink the label it uses for what is known as the "global war on terror," the chief of strategic planning on the Pentagon's Joint Staff said Tuesday.

What is needed, said Army Col. Gary Cheek, is to recast terrorists as the criminals they are.

"If we can change the name ... and find the right sequence of events that allows us to do that, that changes the dynamic of the conflict," said Cheek at the Defense Forum Washington, sponsored by the Marine Corps Association and the U.S. Naval Institute.

"It makes sense for us to find another name for the GWOT," said Cheek. "It merits rethinking. I know our European allies are more comfortable articulating issues of terrorism as criminal threats, rather than war ... It ought to be our goal to partner better with the European allies so we can migrate this from a war to something other than a war."

The "war" moniker elevates al-Qaida and other transnational terrorists, giving them legitimacy as an opposition force to the United States. It also tends to alienate Muslim populations in other countries, who see the war as a war on Islam, and feel they need to support al-Qaida as a matter of defending their faith.

It also tends to frame the fight as one in which the Defense Department has the primary role, when it is becoming increasingly clear that the "long war" against global terrorism is going to be won on other fronts -- economic, political, diplomatic, financial. Other government agencies and departments must become more engaged; only they have the expertise to help other countries take the actions necessary to defeat terrorists.

Cheek's idea is not a new one, and for all the practical sense it makes to the military, it is being floated at a politically inopportune time. Both the U.S. House and the Senate hang in the balance, with a shift from Republican to Democratic control possible after the midterm elections.

To hang onto power, Republicans are returning to their strongest card: national security. And one of their chief attacks on Democrats is their alleged preference to manage terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than being serious about defeating them in a war.

It's a tactic borrowed from President George W. Bush himself. Campaigning for his second term in 2004, Bush hit that theme often, attacking Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry for saying the war on terror was "far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation."

Bush responded: "After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and supporters declared war on the United States of America -- and war is what they got."

But a little more than a year later, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers said in a speech at the National Press Club he had objected to the use of the term "war on terrorism" because it causes people to think that the military is the solution.

Within weeks, Bush publicly overruled Myers and Rumsfeld - who had also adopted the more complicated moniker "global struggle against violent extremism" -- by declaring in a speech in Texas in August 2005: "Make no mistake about it, this is a war against people who profess an ideology, and they use terror as a means to achieve their objectives."

Recent weeks have proven, in fact, that terrorism is often fought with law enforcement: British officials have arrested scores of alleged would-be homegrown terrorists plotting to blow up transatlantic flights to the United States.

And according to David Kilcullen, chief strategist in the State Department's office of the coordinator for counter-terrorism, such law enforcement operations may be more effective and more necessary in the months and years to come. The war in Afghanistan effectively disrupted al-Qaida as an "expeditionary" terrorist group that plans and carries out its own operations like the Sept. 11 attacks.

By contrast, the public transportation attacks in London and Madrid were carried out by local cells "grown close to the target."

"They are evolving away from pre-9/11 expeditionary terrorism to the guerrilla model," said Kilcullen, at the Defense Forum.

Al-Qaida has adopted the war in Iraq into its central strategy, portraying it as a war on Islam that it uses to gain recruits, funding, and score propaganda victories. If the United States can recast it in the global public eye as what the Pentagon views it as now -- a struggle for the imposition of law and order and the establishment of a democracy -- al-Qaida can be drained of some of its power.

The way to do that is to diminish the acts of suicide bombings and car bombings to acts of criminals rather than jihadists.

Tactically, the United States and its partners need to separate al-Qaida from the groups that do its bidding in service to their own local agendas, said Kilcullen. Strategically, al-Qaida and its terrorist tactics need to be delegitimized, according to Cheek.

"When we look at it, we want the world to view terrorism the way we view slavery," he said -- with opprobrium, and with broad global agreement to combat it. "I don't know that that's realistic. So the question is, what is realistic?"

"If we can reduce this to a criminal act, the local government has the capability to act," Cheek said. "The real trick is finding the right time to do that."


7. The Mythical End to the Politics of Fear
Mainstream news reporting accepts and propagates the basic world view of the Bush administration. Nearly five years into the "war on terror," it's still at the core of American media and politics.
By Norman Solomon (from AlterNet)

Yeah, I've seen the recent polls showing a drop in public support for President Bush's "war on terror" claims. And I've read a spate of commentaries this month celebrating Bush's current lack of political traction on the terrorism issue, like the New York Times piece by Frank Rich last Sunday triumphantly proclaiming that "the era of Americans' fearing fear itself is over."

That's a comforting thought, hovering somewhere between complacent and delusional.

Reflexive fear may be on vacation, but it hasn't quit. The "war on terror" motif is fraying -- but it remains close at hand as a mighty pretext for present and future warfare.

The U.S. war effort in Iraq is, if anything, more horrific than it was a year ago. Back then, in late summer, Frank Rich wrote a Times column -- under the headline "Someone Tell the President the War Is Over" -- mocking Bush's assertion on Aug. 11, 2005, that "no decision has been made yet" about withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Responding in print days later, Rich concluded: "The country has already made the decision for Mr. Bush. We're outta there."

A year later, are we "outta there"? Only via the intellectualizing gymnastics of punditland.

More Americans are aware that the "war on terror" -- as an umbrella excuse for making war -- is a bunch of lethal baloney. But can anyone point to a falloff of active U.S. militarism as that realization has dawned? Did the Pentagon's warfare dissipate in the slightest while disdain from mainstream anti-Bush pundits went through the roof?

Looking ahead, does anyone credibly think that Democratic Party leaders can be relied on to stand up against rationales for a huge air assault on Iran -- in the face of predictable claims that a massive attack became necessary to forestall the development of nuclear weapons by a Tehran regime that supports the "terrorist" Hezbollah organization and has pledged the destruction of Israel?

In late summer 2006, all you've got to do is read the news pages of the New York Times to see systematic agenda-building for an airborne assault on Iran. Right now, in front of our eyes, the propaganda blitz is rivaling the kind of war groundwork laid by the same newspaper four years ago, replete with endless coverage of the U.S. government's supposed "diplomatic" efforts.

"The era of Americans' fearing fear itself is over"? Don't make me laugh to keep from crying.

A war against a defined enemy can end; a war against an undefined threat can't.

In late November 2002, appearing on the "Washington Journal" program, retired U.S. Army Gen. William Odom told C-SPAN viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war."

Continuing his heretical comment, Odom said: "We're not going to win the war on terrorism. And it does whip up fear. Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few."

The Bush administration, of course, has bypassed -- and frequently vilified -- any such insights. Meanwhile, few Democrats on the national stage have gone near challenging the themes of the "war on terror(ism)." And while some journalists have grown to express skepticism about the nonstop "anti-terror" rhetoric from the White House and its supporters, the overall stance of news media has involved routinely embracing the assumption that the USA is at war with terrorism. Along the way, that means ignoring how American firepower has been terrorizing civilians -- directly in Iraq and Afghanistan, indirectly in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

The movie "Good Night, And Good Luck" dramatized Edward R. Murrow's decision to (finally) take on Sen. Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting tactics. For those who wonder why so many journalists hung back and declined to directly challenge those tactics, which ran roughshod over the American political process for years, we can look around the U.S. news media of 2006 and get a partial answer.

Yes, we can point to quite a few journalists who have gotten tough on Bush's refusal to address substantive criticism without reverting to the anti-terrorism pitch to tar his critics. But on the whole -- and most egregiously in routine news coverage on front pages and news shows -- the reporting accepts and propagates the basic world view of the Bush administration.

Typically, under the headline "Number of U.S. Troops in Iraq Climbs," an Aug. 23 story from Associated Press reported matter-of-factly: "No more than 2,500 Marines will be recalled at any one time, but there is no cap on the total number who may be forced back into service in the coming years as the military helps fight the war on terror." But the assertion that the U.S. military is fighting a "war on terror" amounts to rhetoric, not fact.

Only as journalists stop cowering and start reporting on the basic flaws of the "war on terror" concept will the body politic benefit from the free circulation of ideas and information -- the lifeblood of democracy. And only then will there be appreciable media space to really explore why so many people have become violently angry with America.

(Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.")