RALLY at the Town Clock for NEW PRIORITIES!

In February, the Berkeley City Council has passed an (admittedly weak) resolution denouncing government treatment of Bradley Manning (http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-02-16/article/37364?headline=Berkeley-City-Council-Fails-to-Pass-Controversial-Resolutions). Lst December, the Mayor refused to put such a resolution on the agenda for discussion. Contact City Council at 420-5020 or e-mail them at citycouncil [at] cityofsantacruz.com to demand a strong resolution denouncing government persecution of Manning.

Meanwhile Manning continues to rot in the brig while U.S. military killings abroad expand without apology.

The following Al Jazeera editorial is an interesting analysis, though a familiar one.


http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/2011310153040668605.html

Treatment of the US soldier shows there is a fine line between torture of enemy combatants and American citizens.
14 Mar 2011 15:41 GMT

Manning is being held at Quantico for allegedly supplying WikiLeaks with a 'secret' video recording and thousands of diplomatic cables [EPA]

Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking a massive trove of classified material to WikiLeaks, has been imprisoned since May 2010. The treatment to which he has been subjected, including protracted isolation, systematic humiliations and routinised sleep deprivation, got more extreme last week when the commander of the brig at Quantico, Virginia, imposed on him a regime of forced nakedness at night and during an inspection of his cell every morning until his clothing is returned.

These types of abusive tactics were authorised by the Bush administration for use on foreign detainees captured in the war on terror, on the theory that causing "debilitation, disorientation and dread" would produce "learned helplessness" and make them more susceptible and responsive to interrogators' questioning.

Reports about Manning's treatment indicate that the Pentagon has continued to utilise reverse-engineered SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, extraction) techniques that were developed during the Cold War to train US soldiers in case they were captured and tortured by regimes that do not adhere to the Geneva Conventions.

The use of such methods in 2011 signals that the American torture playbook hasn't been retired; it's gone into a new printing. In the years between 9/11 and mid-2004, the actual policy of torture was still largely secret. Before the lid was peeled back by the Abu Ghraib photos and the first batch of "torture memos", the touchstone of the public debate was the hypothetical ticking bomb scenario.

Torture advocates opined that the use of non-maiming techniques (i.e., "torture lite") is a lesser evil, and might be legitimately employed by American interrogators to break a recalcitrant terrorist suspected of possessing valuable intelligence (e.g. the whereabouts of that ticking bomb) in order to keep Americans safe. In those years, torture advocates never envisioned the use of such tactics on a US soldier, for if they had, their claims would not have gotten such traction in the mainstream media (or been fetishised in the Jack Bauer character of the popular television program 24).

Domestic torture

Yet, today here we are, subjecting an American soldier to some of the techniques that were cleared for use by the CIA on Abu Zubaydah in 2002. The panoply of tactics applied to Abu Zubaydah includes many that Manning has been spared, such as waterboarding and the confinement box.

This development was hardly unforeseeable. Opponents of torture had staked their positions in the early debate with warnings not only that torture is illegal and ineffective, but also with historic evidence that states which authorise the torture of enemies embark down a slippery slope.

In the Bush administration's inner circle, officials who opposed the authorisation and use of interrogational abuse as illegal and counterproductive to national security were excluded from decision-making. Interrogation policy was guided and gassed by the presumptions that violence and degradation would work to elicit true information, a claim that in the American case has been proven patently false - but still gets trumpeted as true by those who resist being encumbered by facts and evidence.

Presumptions of efficacy and rightlessness had the predictable effect of expanding the universe of those deemed to be torturable in the quest for actionable intelligence. Over the last decade, thousands of foreign prisoners taken into US custody in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq were subjected to systematic and wanton abuses, the vast majority of whom were either entirely innocent (arrested by mistake, rounded up in sweeps through villages or sold for bounty) or who had no meaningful intelligence.

This universe continues to expand because there has been no serious and sustained effort to confront the abject failures and high costs of the torture policy. Rather, the false presumptions of efficacy and rightlessness continue to be persuasive to those who make or endorse US interrogation policy.

Defining the slippery slope

The subjection of Manning to tactics originally authorised for foreign terror suspects proves that torture opponents were correct about the slippery slope, as they were about everything else. Putting Manning through the "learned helplessness" regimen makes president Barack Obama's day-one promise to "end torture" and "restore the rule of law" even more of a mockery than the "looking forward, not backward" commitment to unaccountability for crimes perpetrated by officials of the previous administration. The torturous treatment of soldier/citizen Manning is even occurring on the Nobel Peace Prize-winning no-to-torture-president's watch.

But in Manning's case, the rationale that undergirded the authorisation of interrogational abuse - the legitimate need for actionable intelligence to keep Americans safe - is entirely missing.

Manning has already been charged and faces court martial for providing classified information to a legally undefined enemy - a conundrum that will pickle the process of his prosecution.

The classified information that Manning gathered and leaked because he felt that the public had a right to know includes: over 260,000 diplomatic cables, including ones revealing the lengths to which the US went in trying to thwart torture investigations in allied countries; tens of thousands of intelligence reports about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of which contradict the public discourse about what US forces are doing in those countries; and two videos that expose military targeting of unarmed civilians.

The actual act of leaking has already happened and is over. Manning has been charged. Why, then, is his abuse continuing and intensifying?

There is a slippery slope answer to this, too. States that utilise torture inevitably expand the reasons to justify its use. Manning is being abusively instrumentalised for the goal of trying to implicate WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as an active procurer of the leak in order to seek Assange's extradition to the US.

No evidence has come to light that WikiLeaks or Assange influenced or aided Manning to leak before the fact. But the political beast wants to feast on Assange's head, and so Manning’s interrogational abuse continues.


Lisa Hajjar teaches sociology at the University of California - Santa Barbara and is a co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Good article, and I would remind the author that the slippery slope also pertains to our depiction of the case: Pfc. Manning has been charged but not tried, and despite his punitive detainment is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Simple repetition of the charges seems to cement the idea that he must be guilty. No one but he knows whether that is true. There has been little mention of the higher, over-riding laws he may have followed, in both U.S. military law and the Geneva Conventions, in possibly exposing actual war crimes and trying to prevent more of the same.

Another point seldom noted is that his treatment may be intentionally distracting us from demanding prosecution of those very real crimes which we now know were committed. Our energies have been diverted to defending the messenger rather than indicting those responsible for the crimes for which we now have evidence. There have been few prosecutions of the low-level perpetrators of heinous crimes, and no indictments at all of those officials responsible for the illegal and immoral policies which condoned, encouraged, and covered up their crimes.

We must certainly press for more humane pre-trial treatment of Manning, support and reward the heroic efforts of whomever released documentation of the war crimes, and vigorously demand investigation and prosecution of the real criminals exposed.

While I don't agree with everything in this article (from the libertarian website antiwar.com), I think Raimondo raises a number of important questions and raises some interesting predictions. --R. Norse


RAIMONDO'S ARTICLE (http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/04/03/the-arab-awakening-hijacked/)

The long hand of Washington reaches into Libya.

News of a rift in the Libyan rebel ranks, as reported in the Washington Post, underscores much about what is wrong with US/NATO intervention in Libya:

“When asked who was commanding the army, one career soldier, Ramzi Ali Mohammad, 31, said, ‘Khalifa Haftar.’

“’No, no,’ said another, Abdel Salam Mohammad Ali, 52, a corporal who has been in the army 32 years and remembers Haftar from the war with Chad. ‘It’s Abdul Fattah Younis.’

“’It’s both, together,’ said Mohammad, adding that he had seen Younis visit the front line on Friday. ‘They’re both commanding officers of the war. It’s one operation room and two minds.’”

A ragtag band of untrained civilians, sprinkled with defectors from the Libyan security forces, who don’t even know who commands them – this is not a recipe for success, to say the least. The Libyan revolution, it seems, isn’t ready for prime time. There have been similar conflicts on the civilian level, with some initial confusion over just who was authorized to make statements on behalf of the “interim” ruling council.

The rebel split is centered around the sudden emergence of Khalifa Haftar, whose last known address was in Falls Church, Virginia, and who has now turned up in Libya as the would-be savior of the revolution. Haftar was one of the young colonels who supported Gadhafi’s 1969 coup against King Idris, whose biography is decidedly murky. The Australian avers:

“Raised in the contested town of Ajdabiya, he was a soldier loyal to Gadaffi and the revolution until he was thrown into a pointless slaughter in the regime’s war in Chad. ‘He pushed me into losing battles, with bad information on the enemy leading to huge losses, and many of my top officers were killed,’ Colonel Haftar said.

“Convicted of planning to overthrow Gadaffi and sentenced to death, he got out and spent 25 years in exile, 21 of them in the US. For most of that time, his wife and 12 children lived under house arrest, stripped of their passports and watched around the clock.”

Watched by whom, and for what? Falls Church isn’t far from the CIA’s Langley headquarters, but then again it seems Col. Haftar’s relationship with the CIA is hardly one of captive to jailer, although perhaps that’s how it started out. Haftar, it turns out, is not exactly a defector from the regime. According to this United Nations report on the rebel movement he led from Chad in the 1990s, Haftar joined the Libyan National Salvation Front, a group set up by the Central Intelligence Agency, “in March 1987, after he was captured in the Chadian war. His goal was to create an army to fight against the Libyan authorities.”

His rebel force “disappeared,” according to the report, ‘with the help of the CIA” after the US-friendly regime in Chad was overthrown, and the next thing anybody knew the Colonel showed up in Falls Church, not a stone’s throw away from his new bosses.

The Benghazi authorities, after initially embracing Haftar, are now distancing themselves from him, saying that he is free to join up with the structure they have already put in place, but the confusion on the ground is clear enough.

This is a potential disaster in the making for the rebels, who are already out-gunned and up against a professional force that shows no sign of cracking. The rift dramatizes, in cameo, the role of the United States government as the underminer of revolutionary movements throughout the region.

In Egypt they sought, at first, to deny what was happening and affirm support for Hosni Mubarak (Biden). The switch to support for Mubarak’s designated successor, head of the secret police, wasn’t much more successful. The pattern repeated itself in Yemen and Bahrain, but in Libya the Americans are prepared: they already have the resources in place to hijack the Benghazi rebellion, and that no doubt motivated in part the decision to intervene. After all, here is Col. Haftar, their Manchurian candidate, an apparent victim of Stockholm Syndrome, all ready to go: the infrastructure was in place. Why not use it?

One can almost hear the conversation around the policy planners conference table as the authors of this disaster-in-the-making cooked up a saleable plan, one that could impress the White House as practical and con the media into thinking it was all happening outside Washington’s control.

The same sort of effort is no doubt already underway in Syria, where the sclerotic Ba’athist dictatorship is so brittle it could snap at any moment. What’s darkly comic is that dictator Bashar al-Assad is probably correct when he talks about a “foreign conspiracy” to overthrow his regime – the problem, for Assad, is that a real revolution is brewing against his despotic rule, and it didn’t originate in Washington.

Western attempts to hijack the Arab Awakening are necessarily limited to those countries – few in number – where Washington isn’t allied with the local tyrant. From the steppes of Central Asia, where US-supported potentates sit atop a growing proportion of the world’s oil supply, to the mouth of the Mediterranean, the American eagle has sheltered dozens of emirs, kings, and presidents-for-life under its overstretched wings. If the US winds up trading Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and some of the Gulf states for Libya and possibly Syria, that’s a net loss by any accounting.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department, a prime mover behind this war, is determined to reverse this trend. The idea is to turn the crisis into an opportunity for the expansion of US influence, and give the empire a much-needed buttressing. The President, confronted with the full-bore self-righteousness of the “humanitarian” crowd on his left, and amid rising cries of “Who lost Libya?” on his right, realized he was politically boxed in, and retreated from the field. This left the Amazonian troika of the War Party – Hillary, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council member Samantha Power – victorious and in control of the policy as it evolves into a long term operation.

I noted early on that, for all its nationwide aspirations, the Libyan insurrection is essentially a secessionist movement, and this has been borne out by the progress of the battle on the ground. After the initial success of the uprising in Benghazi and the eastern part of the country – historically known as Cyrenaica – the push to extend the revolt to the West has largely fizzled out. Indeed, it looked, for a while, as if the rebels were in danger of losing Benghazi: the allied intervention prevented that, at least momentarily, but the continued attempts by the rebels to extend their control to Tripoli and environs – where the Gadhafi regime appears to have support – can only end in disaster.

The media is calling this a “stalemate,” but in reality this east-west divide is deeply rooted in the politics and history of the region. With the spell of the dictator’s invincibility broken, the country has simply reverted to its natural precondition, with political power devolving to the ancient emirates (or kingdoms) of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania.

Rather than admit their initial mistake in cobbling together the makeshift “kingdom” of Libya, in 1951, the UN Security Council is determined to compound their error by insisting on the country’s “unity” and “territorial integrity.” An inability to admit error is the hallmark of political elites everywhere, but in the UN we have a special case, one in which unfathomable arrogance combines with bureaucratic inertia to create a recurring cycle of crisis.

The ingredients of a negotiated settlement are all present: the exhaustion of the rebels, the massive defections from the regime, the economic collapse of the oil industry, the death and devastation that are now part of everyday life in Libya. What’s more, the historical context in which all this is occurring suggests the terms of a permanent settlement: the division of the country into east and west. Although the allied powers and the UN would never allow it, in this case the judgment of Solomon should be applied: cut Libya in half, and let the free east serve as an example to the still enslaved west.

Now that the rebels have Western aid and air cover, however, they aren’t about to settle for half a loaf. Emboldened by their overseas sponsors in Washington, London, and Paris, they want the whole thing. A conflict that might have ended in a permanent deadlock and eventually petered out into a cold war scenario will now go on indefinitely.

Just how indefinitely is hard to say, but it’s no longer a matter of “days, not weeks.” When will Congress hold the President accountable, and start enforcing the Constitution? That’s another column altogether, but the short answer is: don’t hold your breath.