The Assasination of Benazir Bhutto

The horrific tragedy that occurred in Pakistan this week is likely to have immense implications in that country and beyond in the near future. Here is a great article that I came across this morning that offers a good perspective of the situation in Pakistan today.

Even those of us sharply critical of Benazir Bhutto's behaviour and policies - both while she was in office and more recently - are stunned and angered by her death. Indignation and fear stalk the country once again.

An odd coexistence of military despotism and anarchy created the conditions leading to her assassination in Rawalpindi yesterday. In the past, military rule was designed to preserve order - and did so for a few years. No longer. Today it creates disorder and promotes lawlessness. How else can one explain the sacking of the chief justice and eight other judges of the country's supreme court for attempting to hold the government's intelligence agencies and the police accountable to courts of law? Their replacements lack the backbone to do anything, let alone conduct a proper inquest into the misdeeds of the agencies to uncover the truth behind the carefully organised killing of a major political leader.

How can Pakistan today be anything but a conflagration of despair? It is assumed that the killers were jihadi fanatics. This may well be true, but were they acting on their own?

Benazir, according to those close to her, had been tempted to boycott the fake elections, but she lacked the political courage to defy Washington. She had plenty of physical courage, and refused to be cowed by threats from local opponents. She had been addressing an election rally in Liaquat Bagh. This is a popular space named after the country's first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, who was killed by an assassin in 1953. The killer, Said Akbar, was immediately shot dead on the orders of a police officer involved in the plot. Not far from here, there once stood a colonial structure where nationalists were imprisoned. This was Rawalpindi jail. It was here that Benazir's father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in April 1979. The military tyrant responsible for his judicial murder made sure the site of the tragedy was destroyed as well.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's death poisoned relations between his Pakistan People's party and the army. Party activists, particularly in the province of Sind, were brutally tortured, humiliated and, sometimes, disappeared or killed.

Pakistan's turbulent history, a result of continuous military rule and unpopular global alliances, confronts the ruling elite now with serious choices. They appear to have no positive aims. The overwhelming majority of the country disapproves of the government's foreign policy. They are angered by its lack of a serious domestic policy except for further enriching a callous and greedy elite that includes a swollen, parasitic military. Now they watch helplessly as politicians are shot dead in front of them.

Benazir had survived the bomb blast yesterday but was felled by bullets fired at her car. The assassins, mindful of their failure in Karachi a month ago, had taken out a double insurance this time. They wanted her dead. It is impossible for even a rigged election to take place now. It will have to be postponed, and the military high command is no doubt contemplating another dose of army rule if the situation gets worse, which could easily happen.

What has happened is a multi-layered tragedy. It's a tragedy for a country on a road to more disasters. Torrents and foaming cataracts lie ahead. And it is a personal tragedy. The house of Bhutto has lost another member. Father, two sons and now a daughter have all died unnatural deaths.

I first met Benazir at her father's house in Karachi when she was a fun-loving teenager, and later at Oxford. She was not a natural politician and had always wanted to be a diplomat, but history and personal tragedy pushed in the other direction. Her father's death transformed her. She had become a new person, determined to take on the military dictator of that time. She had moved to a tiny flat in London, where we would endlessly discuss the future of the country. She would agree that land reforms, mass education programmes, a health service and an independent foreign policy were positive constructive aims and crucial if the country was to be saved from the vultures in and out of uniform. Her constituency was the poor, and she was proud of the fact.

She changed again after becoming prime minister. In the early days, we would argue and in response to my numerous complaints - all she would say was that the world had changed. She couldn't be on the "wrong side" of history. And so, like many others, she made her peace with Washington. It was this that finally led to the deal with Musharraf and her return home after more than a decade in exile. On a number of occasions she told me that she did not fear death. It was one of the dangers of playing politics in Pakistan.

It is difficult to imagine any good coming out of this tragedy, but there is one possibility. Pakistan desperately needs a political party that can speak for the social needs of a bulk of the people. The People's party founded by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was built by the activists of the only popular mass movement the country has known: students, peasants and workers who fought for three months in 1968-69 to topple the country's first military dictator. They saw it as their party, and that feeling persists in some parts of the country to this day, despite everything.

Benazir's horrific death should give her colleagues pause for reflection. To be dependent on a person or a family may be necessary at certain times, but it is a structural weakness, not a strength for a political organisation. The People's party needs to be refounded as a modern and democratic organisation, open to honest debate and discussion, defending social and human rights, uniting the many disparate groups and individuals in Pakistan desperate for any halfway decent alternative, and coming forward with concrete proposals to stabilise occupied and war-torn Afghanistan. This can and should be done. The Bhutto family should not be asked for any more sacrifices.

Black Site Survivor Relates Horrific Tale

A sad look at our new centers of 'freedom and liberty'.

"Black Site" Survivor Relates Horrific Tale
Enforced disappearance and torture at several CIA "black sites"

NEW YORK, Dec 19 (IPS) - As human right lawyers sought to block U.S government efforts to stop a lawsuit against a Boeing subsidiary accused of flying detainees to "black sites" where they were tortured, a legal advocacy group published the first testimony of a victim of the Central Intelligence Agency's "enhanced interrogation" programme.

In the first-ever report of its kind, the Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at New York University School of Law released a firsthand account of a survivor of enforced disappearance and torture at several CIA "black sites". The 63-page report, "Surviving the Darkness: Testimony from the U.S. 'Black Sites'", is an in-depth account of a former CIA detainee's experience in his own words.

The bone-chilling narrative tells the story of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni national who spent more than a year and a half in the CIA's secret detention programme. He was never charged with a terrorism-related crime.

The CHRGJ charges that Bashmilah was "illegally detained by the Jordanian intelligence service in October 2003, tortured into signing a false confession, and then handed over to an American rendition team."

The group says he spent the next 18 months in the U.S. secret detention network -- in sites believed to be in Afghanistan and possibly Eastern Europe. In May 2005, he was transferred to the custody of the Yemen government, which held him in proxy detention at the behest of the U.S. until he was put on trial and finally released in March 2006.

Bashmilah's story was made public as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed legal papers opposing the CIA's attempt to throw out a lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. for its participation in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" programme.

The ACLU charged that the U.S. government is improperly invoking the "state secrets" privilege to avoid judicial scrutiny of this unlawful policy.

Steven Watt, an attorney with the ACLU's Human Rights Programme, told IPS, "Five men have been brutally abused with the help of a U.S. corporation, and they are entitled to their day in court."

"Jeppesen must not be given a free pass for its profitable participation in a torture programme," he said. "And the government should not be allowed to use the national security defence as a way to cover up its mistakes or, worse, its egregious abuses of human rights."

The ACLU filing comes in a lawsuit brought on behalf of five victims of the rendition programme who were kidnapped and secretly transferred by the CIA to U.S.-run overseas prisons or foreign intelligence agencies where they were interrogated and tortured.

According to the lawsuit, Jeppesen knowingly provided flight planning and essential logistical support to aircraft and crew used by the CIA for the clandestine rendition flights.

After the lawsuit was filed, the U.S. government intervened to seek its dismissal, contending that further litigation of the case would be harmful to national security. But the ACLU contends that the information needed to pursue this lawsuit, including details about the rendition programme, is already in the public domain.

It adds, "Jeppesen's involvement in the programme is also a matter of public record. It has been confirmed by extensive documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony, including the sworn declaration of a former senior Jeppesen employee, which was submitted in support of the ACLU filing."

In recent years, the government has asserted the once-rare "state secrets" claim with increasing regularity in an attempt to throw out lawsuits and justify withholding information from the public not only about the rendition programme, but also about illegal wiretapping, torture, and other breaches of U.S. and international law.

It has been 50 years since the United States Supreme Court last reviewed the use of the "state secrets" privilege. The Supreme Court recently refused to review the "state secrets" privilege in a lawsuit brought by Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen also represented by the ACLU, who was kidnapped and rendered to detention, interrogation, and torture in a CIA "black site" prison in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, more than 250 people once held in Iraqi prisons, including Abu Ghraib, have filed suit against a U.S. military contractor for alleged torture of detainees. The Centre for Constitutional Rights filed the lawsuit seeking millions of dollars in compensatory and punitive damages against CACI International Inc. of Arlington, Virginia.

The complaint alleges that CACI interrogators who were sent to Iraqi prisons directed and engaged in torture between 2003 and 2004. The lawsuit charges that the detainees were repeatedly beaten, sodomised, threatened with rape, kept naked in their cells, subjected to electric shock and attacked by unmuzzled dogs, among other humiliations.

The court action also names two CACI employees -- Stephen Stefanowski, known as "Big Steve", and Daniel Johnson, known as "DJ" -- accusing them of participating in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The suit alleges that the two CACI contractors directed Corporal Charles Graner and Sergeant Ivan Frederick. Graner was sentenced to 10 years in prison for this role in the Abu Ghraib scandal; Frederick is serving an eight-year jail term.

"These corporate guys worked in a conspiracy with those military guys to torture people," said Susan Burke, the lead attorney in the case.

"And now the military have been held accountable, but the company guys and the company have not been," she said.

The legal status of U.S. private contractors in Iraq and elsewhere abroad remains cloudy. The Iraqi government says they should be subject to Iraqi law, a position rejected by the U.S. It remains unclear whether they are subject to U.S. law. No U.S. court has yet decided a relevant case, though lawsuits have been brought against a number of contractors, including Blackwater, whose employees are accused of killing 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in a shooting incident in September.

In the CACI case, to the surprise of some legal observers, the government did not intervene on behalf of the contractors and the court ruled that the litigation could go forward.

In a related development, the New York Times reported Wednesday that Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies, "apparently trying to avoid acknowledging an elaborate secret detention system, have quietly set free nearly 100 men suspected of links to terrorism, few of whom were charged."

Human rights groups in Pakistan say those released are some of the nearly 500 Pakistanis presumed to have disappeared into the hands of the Pakistani intelligence agencies cooperating with Washington's fight against terrorism since 2001.

The Times reported that no official reason has been given for the releases. But it quoted Pakistani sources as saying that as pressure has mounted to bring the cases into the courts, "the government has decided to jettison some suspects and spare itself the embarrassment of having to reveal that people have been held on flimsy evidence in the secret system."

Among those pressing to bring the cases into court was the chief justice of Pakistan's Supreme Court, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. He was dismissed by President Pervez Musharraf and remains in detention, although Musharraf last Saturday lifted the state of emergency he imposed in November.

The Times reported that the prisoner releases were "particularly galling to lawyers" because Musharraf had accused the courts of being soft on terrorists, and had used that claim as one justification for imposing emergency rule.

Listen to this Democracy Now clip that aired this week. It's chilling tale by a man who had the misfortune of being picked up and detained by the CIA.

The Other War- Afghanistan

In the infamous 'War on Terror', Afghanistan is almost a sad footnote. Troop levels were never adequate, poor planning and coordination, soaring drug production and the incompetence of Karzai and the government in Kabul have all contributed to a sense that this war could be lost. The New York Times has a good editorial this morning which looks at this issue.

One of the biggest problems is that when NATO took command in Afghanistan, many members expected that most of the fighting would be over and their troops would focus on development and stabilization. Instead, they are increasingly taking casualties, and European leaders have still failed to tell their citizens why Afghanistan matters — and why a major effort must be made to deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a safe haven.

We understand Mr. Gates’s frustration. He might do better with the Europeans if he told another truth: Before NATO got involved, Washington never had enough troops in Afghanistan, nor did it have a coherent strategy for stabilizing and developing the country. Its decision to invade Iraq ended up shortchanging the effort even more. Too few ground troops, meanwhile, meant too much reliance on airstrikes, leading to too many civilian casualties, which fanned popular anger and resistance.

By the end of last week, Mr. Gates and European officials agreed that instead of trading blame they would begin a much needed top-to-bottom review of their strategy. Better late than never. The review must look at everything: politics, development, counternarcotics and security. It must find ways to improve coordination between NATO, Washington and Kabul. It must acknowledge that European and American troops will most likely have to remain there for many years. And it must be done quickly, before Afghanistan unravels even more.

Before urging that the military go forth on new and more exciting adventures (i.e. Iran), it would be wise to step back and see the results of our recent actions in this fight against 'terrorism'.

OPEC Keeps Production Levels Steady

No surprise here.

OPEC said today that it was leaving its production levels unchanged for the moment, signaling that it was more concerned with slowing economic growth than with high oil prices.

The oil cartel rejected calls from oil consumers, including the United States, to increase output to drive down prices. Saudi Arabia had initially said the group would consider increasing production by 500,000 barrels a day but backed down in the face of opposition from other OPEC members after oil prices fell last week.

With oil prices still around $90 a barrel, today’s decision suggests that producers have significantly increased their minimal target price for oil. Analysts now believe that OPEC’s new floor to be around $70 to $80 a barrel.

Given the volatility in oil markets, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said it would meet again in February to review its decision and fine-tune its supply levels.

Court Dismisses Legal Challenge Against Musharraf

Wow- what a surprise!

The War Profiteers- Enough is Enough

There is a must read article in this months Vanity Fair entitled The People vs. the Profiteers. The story told is an amazing look inside the world of the for-profit war machine and the often horrific actions taken by some of the largest defense contractors in Iraq. Here is but one example that the article makes note of:

Consider the case of Grayson's client Bud Conyers, a big, bearded 43-year-old who lives with his ex-wife and her nine children, four of them his, in Enid, Oklahoma. Conyers worked in Iraq as a driver for Kellogg, Brown & Root. Spun off by Halliburton as an independent concern in April, KBR is the world's fifth-largest construction company. Before the war started, the Pentagon awarded it two huge contracts: one, now terminated, to restore the Iraqi oil industry, and another, still in effect, to provide a wide array of logistical-support services to the U.S. military.

In the midday heat of June 16, 2003, Conyers was summoned to fix a broken refrigerated truck—a "reefer," in contractor parlance—at Log Base Seitz, on the edge of Baghdad's airport. He and his colleagues had barely begun to inspect the sealed trailer when they found themselves reeling from a nauseating stench. The freezer was powered by the engine, and only after they got it running again, several hours later, did they dare open the doors.

The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. "Inside, there were 15 human bodies," he recalls. "A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again." The corpses were Iraqis, who had been placed in the truck by a U.S. Army mortuary unit that was operating in the area. That evening, Conyers's colleague Wallace R. Wynia filed an official report: "On account of the heat the bodies were decomposing rapidly.… The inside of the trailer was awful."

It is not unheard of for trucks in a war zone to perform hearse duty. But both civilian and U.S.-military regulations state that once a trailer has been used to store corpses it can never again be loaded with food or drink intended for human consumption. According to the U.S. Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, "Contact with whole or part human remains carries potential risks associated with pathogenic microbiological organisms that may be present in human blood and tissue." The diseases that may be communicated include aids,hepatitis, tuberculosis, septicemia, meningitis, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human variant of mad cow.

It only gets worse...

But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice—ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers's grisly discovery. "You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn't even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.—the public warehouse center—several times. There's nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded."

As late as August 31, 11 weeks after trailer R-89 was emptied of the putrefying bodies, a KBR convoy commander named Jeff Allen filed a mission log stating that it had carried 5,000 pounds of ice that day. This ice, Allen wrote, was "bio-contaminated." But to his horror, on that day alone, "approx 1,800 pounds [were] used."

This is but one example of many of how the privatization of war has been nothing short of a disaster. Slogans that echo from the past such as "Duty, Honor, Country" have been replaced with "Profit, Profit and More Profit". It is the height of insanity for a country to depend on the actions of a private company unrestrained by any type of law to do its war bidding. Private mercenaries have no oath other than to their company. The company has no oath other than to its shareholders.

Americans from all sides of the political divide should be against such the privatization of our armed forces and we owe it to our men and women in uniform to speak out against it. Our military, once the greatest and well run in the world, is slowly dying the death of a thousand cuts.

Republic of Georgia- Just Another Emergency

Much has been reported on the crisis and subsequent martial law emergency rule imposed in Pakistan, but not much has been reported on the latest imposition of martial law emergency rule in the Republic of Georgia. Troops on the streets, media shutdowns, ban on protests. Sadly, the common link in both of these cases is the fact the the United States has publicly backed both of these repressive measures. As Reuters reports,

The top U.S. official for the Caucasus praised Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili on Sunday for his leadership over the last 4 years, but suggested he lift a state of emergency and restore an independent media.

In contrast some Western countries have criticised Saakashvili for a violent crackdown on opposition protests and the muzzling critical media last week.

"The president of Georgia has shown remarkable leadership," said Matt Bryza, assistant secretary of state for European affairs.

"For democracy to move forward and for the people of Georgia to restore their faith in the process, obviously these steps (lifting the state of emergency and restoring freedom of the press) need to be taken," he told Reuters.

"We trust in Georgia, the people of Georgia, the leadership of Georgia."

Of course, this one small detail regarding the Republic of Georgia could have something to do with all of the happy talk: the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline. According to Wikipedia:

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (sometimes abbreviated as BTC pipeline) transports crude petroleum 1,768 kilometres (1,099 mi) from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli oil field in the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. It passes through Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan; Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia; and Ceyhan, a port on the south-eastern Mediterranean coast of Turkey, hence its name. It is the second longest oil pipeline in the world (the longest being the Druzhba pipeline from Russia to central Europe). The first oil that was pumped from the Baku end of the pipeline on May 10, 2005 reached Ceyhan on May 28, 2006.

The construction of the BTC pipeline was one of the biggest engineering projects of the decade, and certainly one of the biggest to have occurred anywhere in western Asia since the fall of the Soviet Union. The construction was largely overseen by David Woodward, BP Azerbaijan Associate President and his understudy Michael Townshend, Executive Director of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline project.

The Caspian Sea lies above one of the world's largest group of oil and gas fields , but its full potential was not exploited under the Soviet Union due to a lack of investment and modern technology. This changed with the independence in 1991 of the countries around the Caspian Sea, when the Western oil companies were able to begin investing in the local oil industry. Caspian Sea oil production is forecast to rise rapidly to a maximum of about 1.5 million barrels (240 000 m³) per day, roughly equivalent to the petroleum output of Mexico, with reserves in the region estimated at around 220 billion barrels (35 km³) of oil – enough to meet the entire world demand for oil for eight years. (It should be noted, though, that it has been suggested that this is a gross overestimate, with Azerbaijan's oil reserves estimated by some to be a mere 32 billion barrels—5.1 billion m³.)

Funny how when you scratch the surface of just about anything these days, oil and pipelines seem to be peeking out from under the ground.


Take a look at what is going on in Georgia today. Imagine waking up one day and finding this going on around you...

Bhutto Supporters Take to the Streets

The situation in Pakistan is ever evolving and becomes larger by the day. According to MSNBC, backers of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and police clashed outside of Parliament. They report:

Police swung batons and fired tear gas at supporters of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto near Pakistan's Parliament on Wednesday, deepening a political crisis triggered by the imposition of military rule.

Earlier, Bhutto called on supporters to defy a ban on protesting the emergency declaration “at all costs,” even as the government threatened to crush her demonstrations.

Outside the parliament building, Associated Press reporters saw hundreds of protesters pushing metal barricades into ranks of riot police blocking their path. Police beat several activists who broke through, and dragged at least three away from the scene.

Just what the outcome of this will be remains a mystery. Will the U.S. and other Western powers continue to back dictator President Musharraf or will they embrace a change of course in Pakistan. With all the constant talk of spreading 'liberty' and 'democracy' (whatever the hell that really means), it would seem to be a no-brainer.

The Crisis in Pakistan

The first large scale demonstrations since the declaration of emergency rule in Pakistan by Musharraf broke out on Monday when thousands of lawyers took to the streets across Pakistan. Police used both tear gas and batons to break up the demonstrations.

The Washington Post reports:

The largest rally took place in the eastern city of Lahore, where lawyers and police battled each other at the city's High Court complex. Several lawyers were injured, and hundreds were arrested before the protesters were dispersed.

Lawyers vowed to continue their protests in the coming days.

"We are determined that until there is freedom for the judges and the overturn of emergency rule, this will war will continue," said Anwar Shaheen, a lawyer in Lahore. "They can't quiet us."

Skirmishes also took place in the western city of Peshawar and the southern city of Karachi. In Islamabad, hundreds of lawyers shouting "Go Musharraf, go!" and "Musharraf is a dog!" protested at the districts courts, but were blocked from taking their procession to the streets.

"He has held the whole nation of 160 million people hostage, just with the backing of the gun and the Western powers," said one protesting lawyer, M.S. Moghul.

This situation has the potential not only to grow inside of Pakistan itself, but perhaps even spread to other countries in the region. Over at TPM Cafe, Steve Clemons has a great article about this in which he states:

"The fact is that governance in a region that is ambivalent about America, Europe and the West in general is becoming more complicated everywhere in the Middle East and South Asia. And it is America's failure in Iraq, its unwillingness to deliver on Palestine, and its bellicosity and hubris that are motivating the Muslim street against those perceived to be aligned with American interests."

This is an issue that we all need to keep an eye on. It will be interesting in the next few days to see if the U.S. will acknowledge the desires of the Pakistani people (i.e. democracy) or throw their weight behind Musharraf.

Here's a clip regarding the situation there.