President Barack Obama’s support for preventively detaining terrorism suspects undoubtedly surprised some of his longtime backers. Holding prisoners at Guantanamo, without the certainty of trial or release, was a defining feature of the previous administration’s counterterrorism policy – and some of its fiercest critics expected Obama to change the policies. But the possibility had been percolating for months. With his pledge in January to close the Guantanamo prison within a year, Obama set off a fierce, mostly under-the-radar debate among legal experts about whether it will be possible to meet the goal he announced yesterday: to build “a legitimate legal framework” for imprisoning terrorism suspects indefinitely.

The question affects more than Guantanamo. The fates of 169 detainees there remain undecided, according to Obama’s numbers yesterday, and administration officials have suggested that they will be unable to prosecute as many as 100. But the legal status of thousands more held by the United States in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas also hangs in limbo, and any detention policy will have ongoing effects as the fight against al-Qaida continues. Here are some of the key issues facing the architects of a new preventive detention system, or, as it’s sometimes called, a “national security court”:

President Obama said yesterday that some suspected terrorists “cannot be prosecuted.” How could that be – haven’t there been plenty of previous cases involving terrorism?

Yes, there have been. A significant number of people have been convicted of terrorism-related offenses in federal trials, including several accused of acting on behalf of al-Qaida. From September 2001 to May of last year, the government won 145 convictions against terrorism suspects, according to an analysis by former federal prosecutors for the progressive legal nonprofit, Human Rights First. That’s not to say it’s easy. The criminal justice system was built to safeguard the rights of defendants. Prosecutors can’t win a case without enough admissible evidence. Sometimes, as in this week’s arrest of four suspects in New York, investigators have tape-recordings of the alleged illegal activity. But more often than not, they depend on witnesses. They can’t use testimony obtained through abusive interrogations. And intelligence agencies are typically loath to collaborate with a public prosecution that puts their sources on a witness stand.

Recent court filings by the Obama administration in cases challenging the legality of Guantanamo detentions offer a glimpse of possible hurdles to prosecuting an accused terrorist. Criminal defendants have the right to see information in government files that could help show their innocence, so prosecutors have a duty to search for all plausibly relevant documents to turn over. Officials said in the filings that evidence about the Guantanamo detainees tops 1.8 million pages, total. All of those would need to be searched for exculpatory information. A test query for several detainees yielded between several hundreds and tens of thousands of “hits” each.

Isn’t detention without trial illegal on its face?

Not necessarily. The traditional laws of war permit preventive detention of both enemy soldiers and hostile civilians until the end of the fight. Standards like the Geneva Conventions require humane treatment of these detainees. Holding aggressors without any intention of trying them is a time-honored right of fighting nations. Why? In wartime, combatants are supposed to fight – so, fighting itself is not a crime. Fighting dirty – for instance, purposefully killing innocent civilians – is prosecutable as a war crime. But even then, there’s no right to a speedy trial, and the captor nation can take its time deciding when or even whether to press charges. It has long been accepted that a nation at war has the right to protect itself by keeping enemies from returning to the battlefield, without having to invest resources or risk public release of military secrets in full-blown trials.

Every trial risks the possibility that a defendant could be acquitted or receive a moderate sentence. Under the laws of war, governments don’t need to take that risk.The possibility that convicted terrorists could win relatively quick release isn’t just theoretical. Of the three military commission convictions so far at Guantanamo, two resulted in sentences of, essentially, time served. One of those convicted was Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, for providing material support to al-Qaida. He was sentenced last year to five-and-a-half years in prison – six months more than time served – and now lives free in Yemen, in a case where the government had sought life imprisonment. A detention system premised on the laws of war would permit Obama to keep his promise of yesterday: “We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security.”

So is the United States at war with terrorists?

A trickier question than it might seem. Terrorists don’t wear uniforms or rush to a battlefield. The front, many argue, could be anywhere – a hotel room in Albania or an alley in Manila. For its part, al-Qaida declared war on the United States in 1998, shortly before its operatives blew up American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Obama has expressed no skepticism on this point, saying in his speech: “We are indeed at war with al-Qaida and its affiliates.” He was able to say so because Congress, which has the constitutional power to declare war, issued the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force after the 9/11 attacks.

That means some terrorists can be held indefinitely as prisoners of war, according to David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor long associated with civil liberties causes. Cole recently stunned the progressive legal community by supporting preventive detention for some detainees in a Boston Review essay. Cole explained in an interview, “You might not have evidence that would satisfy the criminal-conviction standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but perhaps you have very good evidence that a person was a fighter for the Taliban. Should we just release him to go back to the caves and start shooting at U.S. soldiers, just because we don’t have sufficient proof to convict him of a crime?”

Retired U.S. Army Major General John Altenburg, who until resigning in November 2006 had the task of deciding which Guantanamo detainees would be slated for military commission trials, said the Bush administration’s “arrogance and naiveté” about public perception had tarnished the otherwise valid notion of detaining terrorism suspects under a wartime rationale. He said in an interview, “What the previous administration did was allow critics to define the terms of the debate to be the terms of domestic criminal law. So the public is reacting with, ‘What about their lawyer? What about their right to a speedy trial?’”

In fact, Altenburg said, the al-Qaida detainees are not entitled to a speedy trial any more than German prisoners of war in World War II were.

If wartime detention is OK, and the U.S. is at war with terrorists, then why does the nation need a new detention law?

This appears to be as much a question of political support as one of legal reasoning. Obama said yesterday that he’d seek a law spelling out procedures for preventative detention for reasons of political legitimacy. He said he wanted to avoid his predecessor’s “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism.” Earlier this week, top Obama aides invited the most ardent opponents of preventive detention, including the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, to a two-and-a-half-hour meeting. Although administration officials have not publicly discussed that session, some guests were startled by the argument that the president already has sufficient authority to preventively detain terrorism suspects. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said afterward on a conference call with reporters that there was a “surprising misapprehension about what the laws of war permit.”

The legal authority that courts have recognized for the current military detentions of “enemy combatants” is the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which doesn’t even mention detentions. If captives are moved to U.S. soil, they’ll likely be able to invoke greater legal protections than they’ve got now, according to a January analysis by Congressional Research Service lawyers. Possibly, some will even be able to seek political asylum under immigration laws. Long-term preventive detention would therefore require a new law and possibly amendments to others.

Part of the legal puzzle has to do with trying to apply traditional laws of war to the “novel” type of conflict that is terrorism, says Harvey Rishikof, professor of law and national security studies at the National War College. It’s just harder to tell who’s a combatant – and therefore detainable as a POW – and who’s a criminal suspect due for trial, because terrorists are “stateless actors” eschewing uniforms and avoiding battlefields. Attorney General Eric Holder hinted at the complexity of the “battlefield” question as it applies to terrorist combatants at his confirmation hearing. “There are physical battlefields, certainly, in Afghanistan,” he said. “But there are battlefields, potentially, you know, in our nation. There are cyber battlefields.” He went on, “There’s a battlefield, if you want to call it that, with regard to the hearts and minds of the people in the Islamic world.”

Major General Altenburg said, “I personally think the battlefield has to be beyond the ground of an Afghanistan, because al-Qaida is everywhere. Now, there’s no [court] holding anywhere that says that is the law of war, because again, this is unprecedented.”

How would preventive detention of terrorism suspects work?

The closest the public has gotten to a legislative blueprint for preventive detention of terrorism suspects appeared in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain. They called for a “uniform set of standards and procedures administered by a civilian judge,” who would decide the challenges to the legality of detention that the Supreme Court has said are a detainee’s right, and “an annual interagency review” to determine whether a detainee continues to threaten national security and should be held. The senators are expected to be influential voices as any new policy develops.

But before looking at the procedures, policymakers will have to decide who will face detention. The Bush administration initially claimed that it could indefinitely detain anyone the executive branch deemed an “enemy combatant.” The courts trimmed back that sweeping view, saying that the authority was shared with Congress and subject to judicial review. The question is especially acute for terrorism detention, says Harvard law professor and former Bush official Jack Goldsmith, who with Neal Katyal – then a Georgetown law professor, now Obama’s principal deputy solicitor general – was one of the earliest proponents of a new legal regime for terrorism suspects. Because this enemy doesn’t wear a uniform and, to the contrary, takes pains to blend with civilians, identifying candidates for military detention is harder. But since the end of this conflict may similarly be hard to know, there’s a risk that wrong decisions could harm innocent people for a very long time, Goldsmith warns.

One way to get lawmakers to seek utmost accuracy in any detention system, said Goldsmith at a recent Brookings Institution forum, would be to apply it to U.S. citizens as well. “The threat of terrorism can come as easily from a U.S. citizen,” he said. He noted, though, that the idea “is controversial and probably a nonstarter.” It could also be struck down by the Supreme Court, where there are some strong views that citizenship comes with special constitutional protections.

Cole, the Georgetown law professor, stressed that only detainees fitting a classic war-captive profile – members of an organization against whom Congress has authorized the use of military force, who deliberately act or plan harm in order to advance the military goals of the enemy – should be considered for preventive detention. Other terrorists, he said, “should be dealt with through the criminal law.” Broadening the field, he said, would be “a first step on a slippery slope of a broader use of preventive detention for other crimes.”

Some opponents of preventive detention say it’s Orwellian that such a system would imprison a person based on future dangerousness. But, says Cole, even if “we can’t predict the future,” it is possible to measure whether there is “a substantial risk that someone will engage in future dangerous conduct. Waiting for a wrong is not adequate.” Such judgments are made all the time, he said, in civil commitment proceedings, bail hearings and immigration decisions. He said that the key was to focus the inquiry narrowly, not on suspects’ character or beliefs, but on “whether they pose a risk of returning to the battle.”

Retired U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, who as a military lawyer represented Hamdan in his commission trial, worries that a preventive detention option will allow inaccurate judgments of dangerousness. He said that, after hearing all the evidence, “military [jurors] didn’t view Mr. Hamdan as a substantial war criminal.” But someone like Hamdan would be a prime candidate for indefinite detention over prosecution, he said: “The indicia of his criminality were extremely low, but his proximity to bin Laden was extremely high. The adversary system helped show how Hamdan was not dangerous – the question is, whether a national security court would allow that.”

Crucial questions will have to be answered about what burden of proof the government would have to meet to put someone in preventive detention. In civil trials, the prevailing party has to win by a preponderance of the evidence – meaning it’s more likely than not that the party is right. The criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is much higher. Cole advocates that preventive detention be permitted if the government shows “clear and convincing evidence” that the detainee fits certain dangerousness criteria – the current standard for deciding whether an ordinary criminal suspect can be released on bail.

Proponents agree the government should have to periodically renew its case for detaining a person. While wartime detention permits imprisonment until the end of hostilities, no one assumes that it will be clear when hostilities with al-Qaida and its affiliates have ended. Holder said at his confirmation hearing that he could see such reviews happening annually.

Any new system will also have to build in rights for people facing detention. Should they have lawyers of their own choosing? Can hearsay evidence – the testimony of people who don’t have to show up in court and answer for themselves – be accepted against them, as it is under certain exceptions in ordinary court proceedings? Should detention hearings be open or secret? Federal courts are permitted to seal documents or close sessions in cases involving classified or other sensitive information. The presumption, however, is that the courts are open. Goldsmith said preventive detention proceedings should also be presumed public, calling it “essential” to establishing legitimacy here and abroad.

Finally, there is the question of who will decide. The Supreme Court has said that a neutral decision-maker is required to ensure due process for detainees. One of many criticisms of Guantanamo’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals – instituted by the Bush administration and still in effect today – is that the decision-makers are subordinates of the very military commanders who claim the detainees should be held as enemy combatants. Most current proposals for a new detention system say independent federal judges should make the final call.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, responded to my article about possible British complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed (Thus passim) with a reader’s letter in the Guardian, disputing its accuracy. It concluded: ‘These are serious issues which deserve to be discussed seriously. But let us do so on the basis of the facts’. Yesterday another letter appeared in the Guardian, this time from one of Mohamed’s lawyers, offering some compelling detail to contest the Foreign Secretary’s central claim that ‘it is factually wrong to say that we tried to conceal potentially exculpatory material from Mr Mohamed’s defence counsel’. So plainly the facts are disputed. Tempting though it is to plunge into tangled thickets of claim and counter-claim, we must not lose sight of the wood for the trees.

'We are fortunate to have the best security and intelligence services in the world' - Gordon Brown

One big, wood-size question is precisely how we establish those facts in public, especially given that some of them derive from intelligence shared with the British government by the United States. A second is: how can we avoid this ever happening again? Gordon Brown announced on 19 March 2009 that there will be new guidelines for British security and intelligence operatives interviewing detainees abroad. We must wait to see them, but the remit is not wide enough. The principle must surely be that any British operative is obliged, on pain of their career and possible prosecution, to whistleblow if he or she receives any intelligence reports that suggest someone is being tortured under the auspices (direct or indirect) of the US, or of anyone else. And the agency should immediately cease all further cooperation on that particular case, and related ones. Such fundamental human rights trump even that holy-of-holies of British foreign policy, intelligence-sharing with the US. Or is anyone prepared to say: better to stand by while a man is tortured rather than imperil our intelligence-sharing with the US?

Is that wise, Sir?

At the heart of all this is the absolute priority that the British government gives to the supposed ‘special relationship’ with the US, and the way in which British leaders and officials approach it. Take, for example, the story which the Foreign Office has told me with some emphasis over the last week. It is that, soon after David Miliband arrived at the Foreign Office in summer 2007, he wrote to the US secretary of state asking that the British residents incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay be released and returned to Britain. Thereafter, Foreign Office officials worked to make that happen, and secured the release of three of them, but not Mohamed. When Pentagon prosecutors defiantly went ahead to prosecute Mohamed, against a raft of good advice, the issue of potentially exculpatory US intelligence reports in the British government’s possession became acute. The British officials worked hard to get those documents released from US sources to Mohamed’s defence counsel in the US. All along they believed private diplomacy would be more effective than public confrontation. Finally, the charges were dropped and Mohamed was set free – though only after damning judgements of the British High Court and a change of administration in Washington.

In short: we, the British, were the good guys: the Americans were the bad guys. Or rather, some Americans, since characteristically the British government got itself entangled in Washington’s dysfunctional inter-agency process, getting caught in the cross-fire between, say, the State Department and the Pentagon. Taking this account on its own terms, let us accept that, at least from the early summer of 2008, the British Foreign Office made strenuous efforts to achieve the fair treatment and eventual release of Binyam Mohamed. Even if we accept that, what is the deeper lesson of the larger story to which this is only a coda?Here, in miniature, is a classic example of that whole British approach to our relationship with the United States which I call the Jeeves school of diplomacy. Impeccable manners; a discreet smile; always perfect loyalty in public; but privately murmuring insistently ‘is that wise, Sir?’ And back home in  Jeeves’ own club, frequented – as devotees of P G Wodehouse will recall – only by gentlemen’s gentlemen (ie. butlers), you tut-tut about the foolish conduct of the masters.

This has, in some measure, been a British approach for more than sixty years, ever since hegemony passed across the Atlantic. (Jeeves was himself a master once.) But it has been a national strategy with ever diminishing returns, and it has no remedy in the event that his master, Bertie Wooster, goes berserk. What does Jeeves do when Wooster starts torturing people in a back room, or getting a Moroccan butcher to do the penis-slashing for him? What if Wooster embarks on what you believe is a dangerous and mistaken war? From everything we know so far, the British Jeeves’ answer was to murmur by turns ‘might I assist you, Sir?’ and ‘is that wise, Sir?’ That was the approach not just on particular horrors like extraordinary rendition but also on the Iraq war and the whole misbegotten concept of the ‘Global War on Terror’. For all along, the Foreign Office, and much of the British government, knew better, knew that this was not wise or right, and would privately tell you so.

The claim was that this policy best served the British national interest, Britain’s national security and the safety of its citizens. Maybe Tony Blair believed that at the time. Yet a clinching argument was always, as Robin Cook recorded Blair telling a Cabinet meeting in the run-up to the Iraq war, ‘I tell you that we must steer close to America. I we don’t we will lose our influence to shape what they do.’ What influence, Jeeves? What of any significance did you actually change in Bush’s disastrous, law-abusing foreign policy? Not only did this whole strategy end up harming those British national interests, security and reputation in the world that it was supposed to sustain. It was not even good for the United States. We would have been a better friend to the United States if we had spoken up publicly to protest, never even countenanced extraordinary rendition, not gone along into Iraq, and instead – as Obama now advocates – stuck with Afghanistan and more intelligent, civilised, legal and durable ways to combat the real terrorist threats we face.

Not only Britain but the United States, indeed the world, would be in better shape today, if Britain had not continued to play this demeaning part of the faithful retainer who will put up with anything. A true, valued friend is the one who tells you when are doing something stupid or wrong, not a sycophant. This subservient British fetishisation of the Special Relationship, with intelligence-sharing at its heart, ends up weakening even the special relationship. Poor, stupid, self-deluding old Jeeves.

A version of this article appeared in the Guardian, 19th March 2009.

13% isn’t hard to beat, but I’m sure Barack knows that already. Just stay out of the wars and don’t listen to a word from the people who got America into its current state. Go green and invest in alternatives. Go easy on the poets and the preachers. All we are saying, is give peace a chance. Sounds simple. It is.

John J Kelly

By John J Kelly

On the day when UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband opined that the War on Terror had been a mistake,  the Financial Times published conjecture that medallion man Tony Blair was back in the running as a potential EU President. Most people can take a view whether high profile international stooges, Tony Blair and John Howard, ‘improved’ the lives of several million lucky Iraqi refugees and advanced the human rights of millions of citizens bombed and blighted in various ‘peaceful’ war zones, but the third man on the podium, President Ulribe of Colombia, is less prominent on the international stage. Leaving aside the fact that the currency of the Ruritanian-sounding Presidential Medal for Freedom has been somewhat dimished by the fact that peaceniks such as Donald Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks and others can wear it round their necks at Halloween parties, Ulribe is a fascinating choice.

Nobody whinged when Ed Teller, father of the H-Bomb, got a Presidential Freedom Medal

The Presidential Medal of Freedom to Alvaro Ulribe is not his only international honour. In May 2007, the American Jewish Committee gave Uribe its ‘Light Unto The Nations’ award. AJC President E. Robert Goodkind, who presented the award at AJC’s Annual Dinner said: “President Uribe is a staunch ally of the United States, a good friend of Israel and the Jewish people, and is a firm believer in human dignity and human development in Colombia and the Americas”. Quite how and why he is such a great friend to Israel is an intriguing question. Colombia is a very long way from Israel.

The definition of human dignity has been open to wide interpretation under the Bush regime, and, indeed, by the Israel lobby, especially given the enhancement of human rights and dignity currently underway in Gaza. But not everyone is as enthusiatic about Harvard MBA and Oxford postgrad Ulribe’s contribution to peace in Colombia.  Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch division and a longtime campaigner for labour and human rights, said: 

“How could Bush award our nations highest civilian honor to the leader of a country with worldwide pariah status for its systematic crushing of the most basic human rights? Colombia has the world’s highest assassination rate for unionists – more than 460 have been murdered in since Uribe took office in August 2002 – 43 in 2008 (an increase from 2007), even as Colombia faced scrutiny related to a trade agreement Bush negotiated with Uribe (hence the medal).  The Uribe administration has worked consistently to undermine Afro-Colombians civil rights and territorial control. Systematic violence against Afro-Colombians and assassinations of their leaders continue unabated. African descendants comprise 26 percent of Colombias population. Because Colombian law is on the side of Afro-Colombian territorial rights, wealthy interests have employed illegal means to physically remove Afro-Colombians and others from their lands, with hundreds of thousands forcibly expelled from their lands since 2006 alone, often with assistance by the Colombian military. No Afro-Colombian lands have been returned to community control during the Uribe administration. Joint operations between the Colombian military and illegal terrorist paramilitary organizations like the 1997 Operation Genesis in the Afro-Colombian Chocó region have targeted Afro-Colombian leaders with assassinations, while the Colombian military has aerially bombarded Afro-Colombian territories. Such forced displacements are now occurring in port communities, such as Buenaventura, and other regions Colombia Free Trade Agreement supporters seek to develop. More than 200,000 indigenous citizens are being displaced annually. When asked about this, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, William Brownfield said: ‘I do not challenge your figure. I have heard from enough sources – including government of Colombia sources – that the number of internally displaced people in Colombia is, in fact, continuing to rise.’ (Roll Call CongressNow wire service).

Recruiting poster for the paramilitary AUC death squads, presumably aimed at cross dressers

In 2008, Colombian prosecutors ordered the arrest of Mario Uribe, the president’s cousin and closest political ally, who chaired the Colombian Senate and is accused of ties to paramilitary groups. Mario Uribe sought political asylum in the Costa Rican embassy in Bogotá, which denied his request as inadmissible. The Colombian Supreme Court has identified paramilitary ties to 65 current and former members of the Colombian Congress. Thirty-two lawmakers have been detained so far, with 26 of these from Uribe’s governing coalition. Thirty-three additional legislators are under investigation, including 29 from Uribe’s coalition. These include Nancy Gutierrez, a leader in Uribes political party who serves in a position equivalent to that of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. To relate this to the U.S. context, it would be as if the president, Senate majority leader and House speaker were all simultaneously convicted or under investigation for ties to terrorist groups. 

President Ulribe’s father was kidnapped and murdered by revolutionary FARC guerillas in 1983. Ulribe has clamped down on FARC and other revolutionary groups, and has ostensibly calmed down the deliquescent situation in Colombia (though not its principal export, cocaine). But his regime follows the familiar pattern of turning a blind eye to the (allegedly CIA-sponsored?) activities of right-wing ‘paramilitary’ groups (interesting that these are rarely described as ‘terrorists’). The result has been an upsurge in violence, civil unrest and illegal activity. Despite Ulribe’s claims that the paramilitaries are ‘self-defence organisations,’ the skull and crossbone cap badges are a bit of a giveaway.

Democrats, including both Obama and Clinton vowed to revisit The Colombian Free Trade Agreement when presidential candidates, on the grounds that it ‘rewards a nation who’s government has yet to squelch the violence revolving around trade unions and extremist para-military legions’. When in office, will they make good on this promise? Answers in a tightly-rolled hundred dollar bill, please.

President George W. Bush in a final press conference on Monday 12 January, 2009 acknowledged he made some mistakes in the White House, but most Americans – at least for now – are a lot more critical than that. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Americans say Bush is one of the five worst presidents in U.S. history, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Just six percent (6%) say he was one of the five best, and 34% place him somewhere in between. 

Republicans aren’t much help to the retiring 62-year-old Grand Old Party (GOP) president. While predictably 81% of Democrats rate Bush as one of the five worst presidents, so do 20% of Republicans. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans (65%) put Bush in the somewhere-in-between category, while only 11% say he was one of the five best chief executives.

Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 62% rate Bush as one of the five worst presidents, 31% somewhere in between and two percent (2%) one of the five best. In August 2008, a month before Wall Street’s financial problems began hitting the front pages, 41% of Americans said Bush will go down in history as the worst U.S. president ever, but 50% disagreed.

A plurality (41%) say Bush will be best remembered for the war in Iraq, followed by 16% who say his response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and 14% for the economy. Six percent (6%) list the response to Hurricane Katrina and two percent (2%) his role in trying to achieve peace in the Middle East.

For 51% of Democrats, the Iraq war is the chief element of Bush’s legacy, a view shared by 42% of unaffiliateds and just 26% of Republicans. Similar numbers of Republicans give equal weight to his response to 9/11 and his handling of the war on terror. Democrats and those unaffiliated with a major party are more than twice as likely as Republicans to rate the economy as what Bush will be best remembered for.

Even for the accomplishment on which Bush prides himself most, fighting terrorism to keep the country safe from further attacks, he comes up short. “All these [political] debates will matter not if there is another attack on the homeland,” he said in his valedictory press conference. But while 38% say Bush has made America safer, 47% disagree and the rest are not sure. In the first survey on war on terror issues this year, 48% said the United States is safer today than it was before the September 11 terrorist attacks, while 36% disagreed. Only 26% of adults, however, believe America will be a safer place by the end of Barack Obama’s first year as president. While Bush has the distinction of being part of one of only two father-son presidential teams, he suffers in comparison with his dad, President George H.W. Bush, who served from 1989 to 1993. Just 11% say the current occupant of the White House is a better president than his father was, while 56% feel the opposite way. Twenty-five percent (25%) rate the two men about the same.

For December, the final full month of his presidency, 13% of American adults said they Strongly Approved of the way Bush performed his job as president. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapproved. As for his own political party, 77% say Bush hurt the Republicans, while eight percent (8%) say he helped them and the same number (8%) think his presidency had no impact. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of Republicans say he hurt the party, while 14% say he helped it. Seventeen percent (17%) say he had no impact, and 13% are undecided.

Eighty-nine percent (89%) of Democrats and 82% of those not affiliated with either party say Bush hurt the GOP. 

The emetic value of his ennoblement of Tony Blair cannot be overlooked, however. Watch out for the wink at the cringeworthy conclusion to his unintentionally ironic valediction (‘this man believes in freedom’) of his grinning hopfrog.

The contents of this article, which can be viewed in full at the link below, are summarised here with no endorsement or comment by Thus Magazine or guarantees as to their accuracy, save that, where indicated, attributed sources or comment in the public domain has been checked.

This piece, which contains some elements of conjecture, alleges that 3000 tons of ‘ammunition’ is destined to sail from Greece to Israel to arrive by 31 January. The US have not denied the existence of this shipment. The size and conjectured nature of the shipment make it highly unlikely that this was or is part of the ongoing Gaza ‘operation.’ This adds weight to the growing fear that the assault on Gaza is a prelude to a larger engagement by Israel on one or more fronts with its neighbours, but particularly with Iran. Given that the armaments possesed by Hamas (and Hizbollah) are of a relatively primitive order, and their defences scarcely merit ‘bunker-buster’ uranium-tipped missiles (especially at this stage of the operation) the article speculates that this ‘unusually large’ consignment of heavy ‘ammunition’ is destined for an Israeli attack on Iran. The US has allegedly refused support for an Israeli attack on Iran, stating as recently as September 2008 that Israel would need to give ‘prior warning’ before attacking Iran and that Israeli warplanes flying through Iraqi airspace en route to Iran would run the risk of being shot down by US forces. However, Iraqi President Nouri Al-Maliki would now make that call, were it deemed necessary to do do, drawing Iraq into conflict with Iran, were one to arise.

The article also claims that in early January 2009, the Pentagon dispatched over 100 military personnel to Israel from US European Command (EUCOM) to assist in setting up a new sophisticated X-band early warning radar system, part of the military aid package to Israel approved by the Pentagon in September 2008, and is designed to track and destroy missiles from Iran. Meanwhile, Russia has recently opened talks to supply its trading partner, Iran, with S-300 surface-to-air missiles, opening up the real prospect of a new cold war should Israel proceed with its actions, which will require US approval, notwithstanding the ‘independent’ status of Iraq since the US controls the missile defence system and is supplying the armaments.

The entire article may be read here: Global Research, January 11, 2009.

To repeat: Thus Magazine takes no responsibility for the accuracy of its content.

Apart from the grim news of 23 people dead at a Sunni meeting four days ago, followed by over 40 deaths at a Shia shrine on 4 January, there are ominous signs that rumours of a peaceful withdrawal from Iraq are sadly exaggerated. Iraq Bodycount, the most conservative and, (in my opinion), most objective of the main sources of casualty figures, reported on 28 December 2008 that the average number of violent deaths in Iraq attributable to the insurgency and occupation has returned to the 25 per day levels following the 2003 invasion. John Sloboda, founding Director of Iraq Body Count (whose activities Thus endorses) comments that while the ‘surge’ unquestionably reduced the death toll from its height of around 26,000 in 2006-7 to 9,000 in 2008, the latter figure compares to recorded deaths in the three years following the 2003 invasion. Even before the very recent upsurge in sectarian violence, the daily death count has reverted to the equivalent of the 20 months following invasion (25 per day, from May 2003 – Dec 2004). Furthermore, civilian deaths attributable to the conflict between Coalition and anti-occupation combatants have continued more or less unabated through and after the “surge,” the numbers of deaths outside Baghdad are now greater than those in the capital (where deaths have dramatically declined) but deaths among Iraqi police are being progressively replaced by victims among Awakening Council members who have increasingly taken front-line local security roles.

According to Iraq Body Count, “these findings suggest that key components of the remaining violence are inseparable from the occupation itself, and are unlikely to be eliminated while the US military remains in Iraq.” As the US military prepares to hand over control of executive decision-making to its trained Iraqi peacekeeping forces, this does not bode well for 2009.

The recent uptick in sectarian violence seems timed to commemorate the handover of the Green Zone to Iraqi forces, challenge Barack Obama’s declared intention to withdraw US forces from Iraq (and send them to Afghanistan?), and may well be exacerbated by events in Gaza. The latest massacre of Shiite worshippers, many of whom were Iranian pilgrims, in Bagdhad’s northern district of Kadhimiya, where a female suicide bomber detonated herself, killing at least 38 people and wounding up to 100, is probably timed to coincide with Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s visit to Tehran and upcoming Shiite religious festival. Either way, the inability of the indigenous forces to stop this and other atrocities does not bode well. While sectarian brutality is not a direct consequence of the Occupation, it is most definitely an indirect result of empowering Iraq’s fundamentalist tribal sociopaths and giving them renewed energy to pursue religious terrorism. Some argue that sanctioned ethnic cleansing, for example, bribing self-styled Kingmaker Muqtada al-Sadr‘s Shiite militias to stay onside and conceding districts to various criminal terrorist groups, rather than the ‘surge,’ has been mainly responsible for the relative lull of the past 18 months. With the prospect of a handover to the far-from-democratic government of Nouri-Al-Maliki and the ending of the UN Mandate giving the US legitimate sancition to ‘control’ Iraq, these groups may heighten their murderous activities as they jockey for position and test the authorities. Evidence suggests that this is exactly what is happening.

The Iraq Body Count Report concludes that a death toll of up to 9000 in a ‘quiet year’ is hardly a ringing endorsement of the Iraq expedition and is an unacceptable price to pay by any reckoning. Who’s counting the bodies in Gaza, especially since Israel has denied access to the world’s media? Certainly not Tzipi Livni, Israeli Foreign Minister, who does not rate the carnage which has seen over 500 dead and 2000 wounded in 7 days as a humanitarian emergency.

You can read the Iraq BodyCount report, ‘Post Surge Violence: its nature and extent’ here:

Israel is feeling “no real pressure” from the world to end the operation in the Gaza Strip, and the amount of time the international community will sit relatively quietly on the sidelines depends on how things develop, senior diplomatic officials said Sunday. According to the officials, one errant IDF shell could bring to a dramatic end what has been described as “greater understating than you can imagine” for Israel’s actions.” HERB KEINON, Jerusalem Post, Monday 29 December 2008.

No Arab, No Terror, by John Keane, The Inconvenience of History series, 2003

This article from today’s Jerusalem Post : Jerusalem: No international pressure to end op demonstrates the urgent need to send a clear public signal to Israel that its behaviour makes it a pariah in the international community and a threat to world peace. Dancing around the handbags is not an option. While it is true that the Christmas holidays meant that the liberal media was caught on the hop – The Guardian’s 27 December front page concerned the English High Street sales and the movements in Gaza were relegated to a couple of columns in the international section, for example – the world is now catching up. As the undemocratically-compromised US media shows itself broadly in favour of the genocide, up to and including the ‘food aid’ malarky (Thus passim) Israeli citizens should be made fully aware that the rest of the world won’t be fooled again. The Jerusalem Post article notes (disapprovingly) the disapproval of Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish Prime Minister (Thus passim). It also notes, approvingly, the tepid criticism from the EU and the unco-ordinated early statements from the UN, (now followed, as predicted, by a weak statement from the Security Council). The modus operandi of previous Israeli state terror campaigns has been to seek tacit approval from the US, start bombing and withdraw with no apologies or retribution when ‘objectives’ have been met, to muted protest from the western ‘powers’. There are moderate and balanced voices in the Israeli media prepared to describe this tragedy relatively objectively, such as Amos Harel of Haaretz:

The events along the southern front which commenced at 11:30 on Saturday morning are the closest thing there is to a war between Israel and Hamas. It is difficult to ascertain (geographically) where and for how long the violence will reach before international intervention forces a halt to the hostilities. However, Israel’s opening salvo is not merely another “surgical” operation or pinpoint strike. This is the harshest IDF assault on Gaza since the territory was captured during the Six-Day War in 1967.

“Palestinian sources in Gaza report that 40 targets were destroyed in a span of three to five minutes. This was a massive attack much along the lines of what the Americans termed “shock and awe” during their invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Simultaneous, heavy bombardment of a number of targets on which Israel spent months gathering intelligence. The military “target bank” includes dozens of additional targets linked to Hamas, some of which will certainly come under attack in the coming days.

“Like the U.S. assault on Iraq and the Israeli response to the abduction of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser at the outset of the Second Lebanon War (the “night of the Fajr missiles,” a reference to the IAF destruction of Hezbollah’s arsenal of medium-range Fajr missiles), little to no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians. From Israel’s standpoint, Hamas, which persistently fires rockets while using the civilian population as cover, had plenty of opportunities to save face and lower their demands. In stubbornly continuing to launch rockets during the course of recent weeks, it brought this assault on itself. (Read full article here).

The Hamas leadership are incompetent sociopaths who are treating their own constituents as pawns in this deadly game (witness the reports that they are not allowing the wounded access to Egyptian aid).  Sending rockets into civilian complexes, occupied by whoever, is unpardonable, as is suicide bombing and all its derivatives. But, like the US in Fallujah, for example, the ‘contest’ is grotesquely unequal. We expect a degree of compassion and forethought from one of the world’s most civilised and formerly-oppressed peoples. Yet, over the past eight years in particular, this wayward and dysfunctional offspring of Kissinger diplomacy has more or less rampaged as it pleased with a toy box full of the latest weaponry from its doting US parents, the Neocon Nutter family. Indeed, Israeli forces trained and equipped the hapless Georgian clients (2nd largest recipients of US aid after Israel) in their stupid assault on South Ossetia last August, which only now has the spin apparatus managed to turn into a Russian offensive. Nearer to home, Israel has twice trashed the Lebanon, scorched the West Bank, built a grotesque wall reminiscent of Berlin and any number of concentration camps and sewn the seeds of a generation of terrorists by half-starving the disenfranchised people of Gaza, whom it is now indiscriminately bombing prior to re-annexing their miserable territories. The ‘justification’ for all these acts is the ‘War on Terror.’ The reality is that Israel needs land for its immigrant settlers. It is easily the best-equipped military force in the region (with or without nuclear capability, which it has and has threatened to use) and long ago stopped worrying about security.

Except that last year’s land invasion of Lebanon did not go according to plan. A series of blunders and savage resistance from Hizbollah led to a withdrawal, which the incumbent government fears will be met with disapproval at the polls in February’s Israeli elections.

The Jerusalem Post is largely right in its assessment of the level of Western disapproval to date. AIPAC was so sure of its position that its offices were closed until today. But now China and others have joined the howls of protest, and even the UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband has hinted that he is . . . erm . . . less than happy with the slaughter side of things, there is a chance that Israel’s bloodlust can be tempered if enough people are brave enough to say ‘genug ist genug.’

It’s a small thing, but Avaaz have launched a petition, which you can sign here:

Thus will move on now that the regular news sources have come back from their holidays, but silobreaker.com is a good source of aggregated news and opinion for agnostics. The full force of AIPAC will be brought to bear on the world’s media and will intensify as this ‘conflict’ – or turkey shoot – enters its next stage. For light relief, I’ll be reviewing ‘Defiance’ and ‘Waltz with Bashir’ over the next couple of days.

Hopeless in Gaza 2, Nativity 2003, John Keane, the Inconvenience of History, 2003

The US and its ‘allies’ pursued an aggressive ‘war’ counter to the 4th Geneva Convention against Iraq on the spurious justification that Iraq had ignored a UN resolution. Israel is in breach of more than 65 UN Resolutions, but the most significant, Resolution 446, passed in 1979 with abstensions from the UK, Norway and the US, lies at the heart of this current outrage and is key to the continuing Middle East conflict. Notwithstanding that the US has subsequently decided to adhere by UN Resolutions as and when it suits, it should be noted that Professor Richard A Falk and members from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights were detained by Israeli officials for 30 hours at Ben Gurion airport on December 15, 2008 and refused permission to travel to the West Bank and Gaza to document human rights conditions before being deported to Geneva. Professor Falk, an international lawyer and expert on both Nuremberg and the Geneva Convention, had intimated that Israel’s siege of Gaza was counter to international law and had urged prosecution at the ICC in the Hague. He described Israel’s siege of Gaza last year, when it was still not comparable in its severity to the current situation, as follows:

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy.

You can read Resolution 446 here:

The Security Council,

Having heard the statement of the Permanent Representative of Jordan and other statements made before the Council,

Stressing the urgent need to achieve a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, affirming once more that the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 1/ is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem:

1. Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East;

2. Strongly deplores the failure of Israel to abide by Security Council resolutions 237 (1967) of 14 June 1967, 252 (1968) of 21 May 1968 and 298 (1971) of 25 September 1971 and the consensus statement by the President of the Security Council on 11 November 1976 2/ and General Assembly resolutions 2253 (ES-V) and 2254 (ES-V) of 4 and 14 July 1967, 32/5 of 28 October 1977 and 33/113 of 18 December 1978;

3. Calls once more upon Israel, as the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, to rescind its previous measures and to desist from taking any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, and, in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories;

4. Establishes a Commission consisting of three members of the Security Council, to be appointed by the President of the Council after consultations with the members of the Council, to examine the situation relating to settlements in the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem;

5. Requests the Commission to submit its report to the Security Council by 1 July 1979;

6. Requests the Secretary-General to provide the Commission with the necessary facilities to enable it to carry out its mission.

7. Decides to keep the situation in the occupied territories under constant and close scrutiny and to reconvene in July 1979 to review the situation in the light of the findings of the Commission.

The siege of Gaza, refusal to accept the opinion of UN officials, followed by sustained bombardment, followed by a ground offensive and occupation is reminiscent of a recent unfortunate and genocidal US military misadventure, based on the pretext of pursuing a war on terror. Can anyone remember which one? I wonder if they are related.

John J Kelly