The Rag Blog

This sounds like a recipe for something very ugly. The Times is reporting that “the Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.”

“Every company will be subject to such examination, and any company that does not follow the law will lose its license,” the minister, Jawad al-Bolani, said of the planned raids. “They are called security companies. They are not called violate-the-law companies…”

Within Baghdad’s relatively safe and heavily guarded Green Zone, there have been early indications of a battle over who controls Iraqi streets. Private security guards say that Iraqi police officers have already descended on Western compounds and stopped vehicles driven by Westerners to check for weapons violations in recent weeks.

Any extension of those measures into the rest of the country, known as the Red Zone, could quickly turn into armed confrontation. Westerners are wary of Interior Ministry checkpoints, some of which have been fake, as well as of ministry units, which are sometimes militia-controlled and have been implicated in sectarian killings. Western convoys routinely have to choose between the risk of stopping and the risk of accelerating past what appear to be official Iraqi forces.

And because Western convoys run by private security companies are often protecting senior American civilian and military officials, the Iraqi government’s struggle with the companies has in some cases become a sort of proxy tug-of-war with the United States.

Meanwhile, the Post examines an incident from February, when “a sniper employed by Blackwater USA, the private security company, opened fire from the roof of the Iraqi Justice Ministry. The bullet tore through the head of a 23-year-old guard for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network, who was standing on a balcony across an open traffic circle. Another guard rushed to his colleague’s side and was fatally shot in the neck. A third guard was found dead more than an hour later on the same balcony.”

Eight people who responded to the shootings — including media network and Justice Ministry guards and an Iraqi army commander — and five network officials in the compound said none of the slain guards had fired on the Justice Ministry, where a U.S. diplomat was in a meeting. An Iraqi police report described the shootings as “an act of terrorism” and said Blackwater “caused the incident.” The media network concluded that the guards were killed “without any provocation.”

The U.S. government reached a different conclusion. Based on information from the Blackwater guards, who said they were fired upon, the State Department determined that the security team’s actions “fell within approved rules governing the use of force,” according to an official from the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Neither U.S. Embassy officials nor Blackwater representatives interviewed witnesses or returned to the network, less than a quarter-mile from Baghdad’s Green Zone, to investigate.

The incident shows how American officials responsible for overseeing the security company conducted only a cursory investigation when Blackwater guards opened fire.

11/08/07 “ICH” — — -The Bush administration has covered up and ignored dissenting Pentagon war games analysis that suggests an attack on Iran’s nuclear or military facilities will lead directly to the annihilation of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet now stationed in the Persian Gulf. Lt. General Paul Van Riper led a hypothetical Persian Gulf state in the 2002 Millennium Challenge wargames that resulted in the destruction of the Fifth Fleet. His experience and conclusions regarding the vulnerability of the Fifth Fleet to an assymetrical military conflict with Iran have been ignored. Neoconservatives within the Bush administration are currently aggressively promoting a range of military actions against Iran that will culminate in it attacking the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet with sophisticated cruise anti-ship missiles. They are ignoring Van Riper’s experiences in the Millennium Challenge and how it applies to the current nuclear conflict with Iran.

Iran has sufficient quantities of cruise missiles to destroy much or all of the Fifth Fleet which is within range of Iran’s mobile missile launchers strategically located along its mountainous terrain overlooking the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration is deliberately downplaying the vulnerability of the Fifth Fleet to Iran’s advanced missile technology which has been purchased from Russia and China since the late 1990’s. The most sophisticated of Iran’s cruise missiles are the ‘Sunburn’ and ‘Yakhonts’. These are missiles against which U.S. military experts conclude modern warships have no effective defense. By deliberately provoking an Iranian retaliation to U.S. military actions, the neoconservatives will knowingly sacrifice much or all of the Fifth Fleet. This will culminate in a new Pearl Harbor that will create the right political environment for total war against Iran, and expanded military actions in the Persian Gulf region.

The Fifth Fleet’s Vulnerability to Iran’s Anti-Ship Missile Arsenal

The U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet is headquartered in the Gulf State of Bahrain which is responsible for patrolling the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, Suez Canal and parts of the Indian Ocean. The Fifth Fleet currently comprises a carrier group and two helicopter carrier ships. Its size peaked at five aircraft carrier groups and six helicopter carriers in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq. Presently, it is led by the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), the first nuclear powered aircraft carrier commissioned in 1961. It is the oldest of the Navy’s nuclear powered class carriers and scheduled to be decommissioned in 2015 when the first of the new Ford Class carriers enters service. The Enterprise has over 5000 Navy personnel, and on November 2, began participating in a Naval exercise in the Persian Gulf. http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSL02134242 .

The Fifth Fleet is part of Central Command which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, including the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Central Command is led by Admiral William Fallon, the first naval officer to head Central Command. His appointment reflected widespread opinion that Naval forces would be central in the evolution of missions and goals in the Persian Gulf region. Robert Gates, the U.S. Secretary of Defense explained: “As you look at the range of options available to the United States, the use of naval and air power, potentially, it made sense to me for all those reasons for Fallon to have the job.” http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/15/1212/ It would be Central Command and the Fifth Fleet that would be directly responsible for carrying out a new war against Iran. As a result, it would be the Fifth Fleet that would be most vulnerable of all U.S. military assets to Iran’s arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles.

The Fifth Fleet’s base in Bahrain, is only 150 miles away from the Iranian coast, and would itself be in range of Iran’s new generation of anti-ship cruise missiles. Also, any Naval ships in the confined terrain of the Persian Gulf would have difficulty in maneuvering and would be within range of Iran’s rugged coastline which extends all along the Persian Gulf to the Arabian sea.

Iran began purchasing advanced military technology from Russia soon after the latter pulled out in 2000 from the Gore-Chernomyrdin Protocol, which limited Russia’s sales of military equipment to Iran. http://english.pravda.ru/russia/politics/03-12-2005/9334-iran-0 . Russia subsequently began selling Iran military technology that could be used in any military conflict with the U.S. This included air defense systems and anti-ship cruise missiles in which Russia specialized to offset the U.S. large naval superiority. One researcher of Russia’s missile technology explains its focus on anti-ship technologies:

Many years ago, Soviet planners gave up trying to match the US Navy ship for ship, gun for gun, and dollar for dollar. The Soviets simply could not compete with the high levels of US spending required to build up and maintain a huge naval armada. They shrewdly adopted an alternative approach based on strategic defense. They searched for weaknesses, and sought relatively inexpensive ways to exploit those weaknesses. The Soviets succeeded: by developing several supersonic anti-ship missiles, one of which, the SS-N-22 Sunburn, has been called “the most lethal missile in the world today.” http://www.rense.com/general59/theSunburniransawesome.htm

The SS-N-22 or ‘Sunburn” has a speed of Mach 2.5 or 1500 miles an hour, uses stealth technology and has a range up to 130 miles. It contains a conventional warhead of 750 lbs that can destroy most ships. Of even greater concern is Russia’s SSN-X-26 or ‘Yakhonts’ cruise missile which has a range of 185 miles which makes all US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf vulnerable to attack. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/row/ss-n-26.htm .

More importantly the Yakhonts has been specifically developed for use against Carrier groups, and has been sold by Russia on the international arms trade.

Both the Yakhonts and the Sunburn missiles are designed to defeat the Aegis radar defense currently used on U.S. Navy ships by using stealth technology and low ground hugging flying maneuvers. In their final approaches these missiles take evasive maneuvers to defeat anti-ship missile defenses. The best defense the Navy has against Sunburn and Yakhonts cruise missiles has been the Sea-RAM (Rolling Actionframe Missile system) anti-ship missile defense system which is a modified form of the Phalanx 20 mm cannon gun . The Sea-RAM has been tested with a 95% success rate against the ‘Vandal’ supersonic missile capable of Mach 2.5 speeds but does not have the radar evading and final flight maneuvers of Russian anti-ship missiles. http://www.navybuddies.com/launcher/ram.htm Naval ships are having their anti-ship missile defense fitted with the new Sea-RAM http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htada/articles/20060412.aspx. However, the Sea-RAM has not yet been tested in actual battle conditions nor against the Sunburn or Yakhonts missiles which out-perform the Vandal. The Vandal is currently scheduled for replacement by the ‘Coyote’ which replicates many of the evasive maneuvers of the Russia anti-ship missiles necessary for developing an effective defense. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/gqm-163.htm .

So great is the threat posed by the Sunburn, Yakhonts and other advanced anti-ship missiles being developed by Russia and sold to China, Iran and other countries, that the Pentagon’s weapons testing office in 2007 moved to halt production on further aircraft carriers until an effective defense was developed. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=a5LkaU0wj714&refer=home . Iran has purchased sufficient quantities of both the Sunbeam and Yakhonts to destroy much or all of the Fifth Fleet anywhere in the Persian Gulf from its mountainous coastal terrain.

Millennium Challenge Wargames and GAO Report

In 2000, the Government Accountability Office (formerly General Accounting Office – GAO) conducted a study on the US Navy’s preparedness for anti-ship cruise missiles http://fas.org/man/gao/nsiad-00-149.htm . Subtitled, Comprehensive Strategy Needed to Improve Ship Cruise Missile Defense, the study pointed out that the “threat to surface ships from sophisticated anti-ship cruise missiles is increasing. Nearly 70 nations have deployed sea- and land-launched cruise missiles, and 20 nations have air-launched cruise missiles.” The study found that although “the Navy has made some progress in improving surface ship self-defense capabilities, most ships continue to have only limited capabilities against cruise missile threats.” A subsequent military study in 2003 found that only 27 Naval ships were fitted with the Sea-RAM anti-missile defense which had performed well in tests. http://www.jfsc.ndu.edu/current_students/documents_policies/documents/jca_cca_awsp/Cruise_Missile_Defense_Final.doc . The GAO study found that while “Navy leaders express concern about the vulnerability of surface ships, that concern may not be reflected in the budget [1997-2005] for ship self-defense programs.” Most importantly, the GAO study found that Navy assessments “overstates the actual and projected capabilities of surface ships to protect themselves from cruise missiles.” The GAO study’s criticism of the Navy’s capacity to satisfactorily deal with cruise missile threats was vividly illustrated in the Millennium Challenge wargames held in the summer of 2002.

The “Millennium Challenge” was one of the largest wargames ever conducted and wargames involved 13,500 troops spread out at over 17 locations. The wargames involved heavy usage of computer simulations, extended over a three week period and cost $250 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002 Millennium Challenge involved asymmetrical warfare between the U.S military forces, led by General William Kernan, and an unnamed state in the Persian Gulf. According to General Kernan, the wargames “would test a series of new war-fighting concepts recently developed by the Pentagon.” http://www.rense.com/general64/fore.htm . Using a range of asymmetrical attack strategies using disguised civilian boats for launching attacks, planes in Kamikaze attacks, and Silkworm cruise missiles, much of the Fifth Fleet was sunk. The games revealed how asymmetrical strategies could exploit the Fifth Fleet’s vulnerability against anti-ship cruise missiles in the confined waters of the Persian Gulf.

In a controversial decision, the Pentagon decided to simply ‘refloat’ the Fifth Fleet to continue the exercise which led to the eventual defeat of the Persian Gulf state. The sinking of the Fifth Fleet was ignored and the wargames declared a success for the “new war-fighting concepts” adopted by Gen. Kernan. This led to Lt General Paul Van Riper, the commander of the mythical Gulf State, calling the official results “empty sloganeering”. In a later television interview, General Riper elaborated further:

“There were accusations that Millennium Challenge was rigged. I can tell you it was not. It started out as a free-play exercise, in which both Red and Blue had the opportunity to win the game. However, about the third or fourth day, when the concepts that the command was testing failed to live up to their expectations, the command at that point began to script the exercise in order to prove these concepts. This was my critical complaint.” http://www.rense.com/general64/fore.htm

Most significant was General Riper’s claims of the effectiveness of the older Cruise missile technology, the Silkworm missile which were used to sink an aircraft carrier and two helicopter-carriers loaded with marines in the total of 16 ships sunk. When asked to confirm Riper’s claims, General Kernar replied: “Well, I don’t know. To be honest with you. I haven’t had an opportunity to assess what happened. But that’s a possibility… The specifics of the cruise-missile piece… I really can’t answer that question. We’ll have to get back to you” http://www.rense.com/general64/fore.htm

The Millennium Challenge wargames clearly demonstrated the vulnerability of the US Fifth Fleet to Silkworm cruise missile attacks. This replicated the experience of the British during the 1980 Falklands war where two ships were sunk by three Exocet missiles. Both the Exocet and Silkworm cruise missiles were an older generation of anti-ship missile technology that were far surpassed by the Sunburn and Yakhonts missiles. If the Millennium Challenge was a guide to an asymmetrical war with Iran, much of the U.S Fifth Fleet would be destroyed. It is not surprising Millennium Challenge was eventually scripted so that this embarrassing fact was hidden. To date, there has been little public awareness of the vulnerability of the US Fifth Fleet while stationed in the Persian Gulf. It appears that the Bush administration had scripted an outcome to the wargames that would promote its neoconservative agenda for the Middle East.

The Neo-Conservative Strategy to Attack Iran

Neoconservatives share a political philosophy that US dominance of the international system as the world’s sole superpower needs to be extended indefinitely into the 21st century. Part of the neoconservative agenda is to identify and overthrow states that are opposed to the current U.S. dominated international system. After the 911 attacks, rogue states viewed as supporters of international terrorism were elevated into what President Bush called in his 2002 State of the Union speech the “Axis of Evil” . http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129-11.html These originally included Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Neoconservatives view forceful diplomacy backed by military intervention as the price to pay for reigning in rogue states that support terrorism. Up until the 2003 invasion, Iraq had been the principal rogue state that was a targeted by neoconservatives. Subsequent to the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein and forceful multilateral diplomacy on North Korea, neo-conservative attention has firmly shifted to Iran.

In early 2006 neoconservatives within the Bush administration began vigorously promoting a new war against Iran due to the alleged threat posed by its nuclear development program. Iran has consistently maintained that its nuclear development is lawful and in compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Article IV.1 of the NPT states: “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes…” http://www.un.org/events/npt2005/npttreaty.html . The only constraint on this “inalienable right” is that states must agree not to pursue a nuclear weapons program as identified in Articles I and II of the NPT. Since 2004, The Bush administration has been citing intelligence data that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons and must under no circumstances be allowed to do this.

Much of Iran’s nuclear development has occurred in underground facilities built at a depth of 70 feet with hardened concrete overhead that protect them from any known conventional attack. This led to the Bush administration arguing in early 2006 that tactical nuclear weapons would need to be used to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/17/060417fa_fact This culminated in a fierce debate between leading neo-conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff which remained adamantly opposed. Seymour Hersh in May 2006, reported the opposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. …. “Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to them. Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/10/060710fa_fact .

Subsequent efforts by the neo-conservatives to justify a conventional military attack have been handicapped by widespread public skepticism by the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran’s compliance with the Nonproliferation Treaty. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has stated that Iran is complying with its inspection requirements. In a statement on October 8, 2007, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the IAEA, dismissed the main argument used by the Bush administration when he said “I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear weapons program going on right now.” http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20071028-114627-4645r . ElBaradei went on to cite U.S. military assessments that Iran is a few years away from developing weapons grade nuclear fuel that could be used for nuclear weapons. The Bush administration, frustrated by the determined opposition both within the U.S bureaucracy, military and the international community to its plans has adopted a three pronged track strategy for its goal of ‘taking out’ Iran.

First Attack Strategy

The first strategy is to drive up public perceptions of an international security crisis by warning of a Third World War if Iran’s nuclear program is not stopped. In a Press Conference speech on October 17, President Bush declared:

I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [Iranians] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I take the threat of Iran with a nuclear weapon very seriously. And we’ll continue to work with all nations about the seriousness of this threat. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/10/20071017.html

Bush’s startling rhetoric was followed soon after by Vice President Cheney on October 23 who warned in a speech before the Washington Institute for Near East Studies: ”Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions.” http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/21/cheney.iran.ap/ Cheney went on to allude in his speech to military action where the US and its allies were “prepared to impose serious consequences.” He then declared: “We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

Bush’s and Cheney’s alarming rhetoric provides political cover for Israel, which is also adamantly opposed to Iran’s nuclear developments plans, to bomb its nuclear facilities. On September 6, 2007 an elite Israeli Air Force Squadron launched a daring air raid and destroyed a secret Syrian facility that had allegedly received nuclear material from North Korea. According to a Sunday Times report, the “Israelis proved they could penetrate the Syrian air defense system, which is stronger than the one protecting Iranian nuclear sites.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2461421.ece The Syrian raid was a test run for what Israel could do against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Bush administration has been encouraging a covert Israeli military strike against Iran given determined opposition to a U.S. led military strike. An earlier Sunday Times report from January 2007 exposed Israeli plans for airstrikes against Iran using nuclear armed bunker busting weapons in the event the U.S. did not move forward: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article1290331.ece . However, the U.S. military is also opposed to a unilateral attack by Israel which would result in a furious Iranian retaliation against American forces.

There were unconfirmed reports that the U.S. denied Israel the flight codes to fly over Iraqi airspace for an early 2007 air raid sanctioned by neoconservatives within the Bush administration. Currently, Admiral Fallon, the Commander of Central Command, is opposed to U.S. military strikes against Iran. During his confirmation hearing in February 2007, Fallon privately confided that an attack on Iran “will not happen on my watch” http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/15/1212/ . It is highly likely that Fallon would veto any Israeli attack on Iran, and deny it the flight codes it requires for flying over Iraqi airspace.

Second Attack Strategy

The second strategy has been shift emphasis from removing Iran’s nuclear facilities, to emphasizing its support for terrorism. Given widespread military and political opposition to attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the Bush administration is now depicting Iran as a supporter of terrorism in Iraq. Seymour Hersh described the shift as follows:

“Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.” http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh .

The change in strategy was given a powerful boost by the passage of the Kyle-Lieberman amendment by the U.S. Senate on September 26 which designated “the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization” http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:SP3017: . This would enable the Bush administration to authorize strikes against Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities inside Iran on the basis that they are supporting Iraqi terrorist groups targeting U.S. military forces. According to Hersh the shift in strategy is gaining support from among the American military. While Admiral William Fallon has privately expressed opposition to military action against Iran, the commander of U.S. forces inside Iraq, General Petraeus, supports the Bush administration’s Iran policies. Petraeus has declared: “None of us, earlier this year, appreciated the extent of Iranian involvement in Iraq, something about which we and Iraq’s leaders all now have greater concern”. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=2 Petraeus went on to claim that Iran was fighting “a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces in Iraq.” Consequently, limited surgical strikes against Revolutionary Guards facilities might be authorized by the Bush administration.

Third Attack Strategy

The third and most dangerous strategy used by the Bush administration is to sanction a covert mission that would create the necessary political environment for a war against Iran. This is arguably best evidenced in the infamous B-52 ‘Bent Spear’ incident on August 30, 2007 where five (later changed to six) nuclear armed cruise missiles were found en route to the Middle East for a covert mission. http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__071020_the_b_52_incident__96_.htm The nuclear warheads had adjustable yields of between 5 to 150 kilotons, and would have been ideal for use against Iran’s underground nuclear facilities or in a false flag operation that would be blamed on Iran. According to confidential sources, the covert mission involving the B-52 was to coincide with Israel’s September 6 military strike against a Syrian military facility http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_wayne_ma_070928_news_of_b_52_nukes_l.htm . However, Air Force personnel stood down ‘illegal’ orders that most likely came from the White House, and averted what could have been the detonation of one or more nuclear devices in the Persian Gulf region. There is much evidence to believe that ultimate responsibility for the B-52 incident can be traced to the office of the Vice President. http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__070907_was_a_covert_attempt.htm Due to the Bush administration’s authority directly order military units to participate in covert missions regardless of their legality, the possibility that a covert mission will be used to provoke a war with Iran remains high.

Consequences of Iran being Attacked

In an effort to intimidate Iran, the Bush administration has regularly placed two aircraft carrier group formations in the Persian Gulf http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2007/ss_gulf_11_04.asp . In the naval exercises that began on Novembers 2, the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) and a helicopter carrier, the USS Kearsarge (LHD 3), are in the Persian Gulf simulating “a quick response to possible crises” http://www.cusnc.navy.mil/articles/2007/228.html . The size and timing of possible U.S. military attacks on Iran’s nuclear and/or military facilities, will influence the speed and scale of an Iranian response. Iran’s response will predictably result in a military escalation that culminates in Iran using its arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles on the U.S. Fifth Fleet and closing off the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping. Iran’s ability to hide and launch cruise missiles from mountainous positions all along the Persian Gulf will make all Fifth Fleet ships in the Persian Gulf vulnerable. The Fifth Fleet would be trapped and unable to escape to safer waters. The Millennium Challenge wargames in 2002 witnessed the sinking of most of the Fifth fleet. Less advanced Silkworm cruise missiles, when compared to Iran’s stock of Sunburn and Yakhonts missiles, were used in a simulated asymmetric warfare that would resemble what would occur if Iran and the U.S. went to war. The sunk ships included an aircraft carrier, two helicopter carriers in the total of 16 ships that were ‘refloated’ in the exercise to produce a scripted outcome.

If an attack on Iran were to occur before the end of 2007, it would lead to the destruction of the USS Enterprise with its complement of 5000 personnel on board. Further losses in terms of support ships and other Fifth Fleet naval forces in the Persian Gulf would be catastrophic. An Iranian cruise missile attack would replicate losses at Pearl Harbor where the sinking of five ships, destruction of 188 aircraft and deaths of 2,333 quickly led to a declaration of total war against Imperial Japan by the U.S. Congress.

The declaration of total war against Iran by the U.S. Congress would lead to a sustained bombing campaign and eventual military invasion to bring about regime change in Iran. Military conscription would occur in order to provide personnel for the invasion of Iran, and to support U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan that would come under greater pressure. Tensions would rapidly escalate with other major powers such as Russia and China who have supplied Iran with sophisticated weapons systems that could be used against U.S. military assets. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping and total war conditions in the U.S. would lead to a collapse of the world economy, and further erosion of civil liberties in a U.S. engaged in total war.

Conclusions

The above scenario is very plausible given the military capacities of Iran’s anti-ship cruise missiles and the U.S. Navy’s vulnerability to these while operating in the Persian Gulf. The Bush administration has hidden from the American public the full extent of the Fifth Fleet’s vulnerability, and how it could be trapped and destroyed in a full scale conflict with Iran. This is best evidenced by the controversial decision to downplay the real results of the Millennium Challenge wargames and the dissenting views of Lt. General Van Riper over the lessons to be learned. The Bush administration is also downplaying the significance of the 2000 GAO report on US Navy vulnerability to cruise missile attacks.

Neo-conservatives within the Bush administration are fully aware of the vulnerability of the Fifth Fleet, yet have at times tried to place up to three carrier groups in the Persian Gulf which would only augment U.S. losses in any war with Iran. Yet the Bush administration has still attempted to move forward with plans for nuclear, conventional and/or covert attacks on Iran which would precipitate much of the terrible scenario described above.

A reasonable conclusion to draw is that neoconservatives within the Bush administration are willing to sacrifice much or all of the U.S. Fifth Fleet by militarily provoking Iran to launch its anti-ship cruise missile arsenal in order to justify ‘total war’ against Iran, and force regime change. An immediate solution is to expose the neo-conservative agenda to sacrifice the Fifth Fleet and to make accountable all those responsible for it.

On April 24, 2007 Congressman Dennis Kucinich began circulating articles for impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney which included among his “high crimes and misdemeanors” his advocacy of aggression against Iran. http://kucinich.house.gov/UploadedFiles/int3.pdf . The relevant section in the Kucinich bill states:

“With respect to Article III, that in his conduct while vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney openly threatened aggression against the Republic of Iran, absent any real threat to the United States, and has done so with the United States’s proven capability to carry out such threats, thus undermining the national security interests of the United States.”.

After gaining additional support from 21 members of Congress as co-sponsors, Kucinich introduce his articles of impeachment as a privileged resolution on November 6 to force a vote in the House of Representatives. http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=77985 . His privileged resolution was voted on and referred to the House Judiciary Committee for further study.

In addition to Vice President Cheney, President Bush also is culpable for the neo-conservative agenda to sacrifice the Fifth Fleet by militarily provoking Iran into launching hostilities that culminates in total war with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Impeachment proceedings also need to be launched against President Bush for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for approving neoconservative plan to sacrifice the U.S. Fifth Fleet through an unnecessary military provocation of Iran. A new Pearl Harbor can be averted by making accountable Bush administration officials willing to sacrifice the Fifth Fleet in pursuit of a neoconservative agenda.

***

About the Author

Dr. Michael Salla is an internationally recognized scholar in international politics, conflict resolution, US foreign policy and the new field of ‘exopolitics’. He is author/editor of five books; and held academic appointments in the School of International Service& the Center for Global Peace, American University, Washington DC (1996-2004); the Department of Political Science, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (1994-96); and the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington D.C., (2002). He has a Ph.D in Government from the University of Queensland, Australia, and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has conducted research and fieldwork in the ethnic conflicts in East Timor, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Sri Lanka, and organized peacemaking initiatives involving mid to high level participants from these conflicts.

Website: www.americasherojourney.com

Recommended Reading

Governmental Accountability Office, “Defense Acquisitions: Comprehensive Strategy Needed to Improve Ship Cruise Missile Defense.” Letter Report, 07/11/2000, GAO/NSIAD-00-149. http://fas.org/man/gao/nsiad-00-149.htm

Mark Gaffney, “The Sunburn – Iran’s Awesome Nuclear Anti-Ship Missile The Weapon That Could Defeat The US In The Gulf” 11/02/2004, http://www.rense.com/general59/theSunburniransawesome.htm

Mark Gaffney, “Myth Of US Invincibility Floats In The Persian Gulf,” 04/16/2005 “http://www.rense.com/general64/fore.htm

Seymour Hersh, “The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?” New Yorker, 4//17/2006 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/17/060417fa_fact

Seymour Hersh, “Last Stand: The military’s problem with the President’s Iran policy,”New Yorker, 07/10/2006 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/07/10/060710fa_fact

Seymour Hersh, “Shifting Targets: The Administration’s plan for Iran,” 10/08/ 2007

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/08/071008fa_fact_hersh

Dennis Kucinich, “Rep. Dennis Kucinich Privileged Resolution,” Speech to U.S. House of Representatives 11/06/07, http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=78044

Michael Salla, “The B-52 Incident – An Unfolding Saga of Villains, Scapegoats and Heroes,” OpEdNews, 10/20/2007 http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__071020_the_b_52_incident__96_.htm

Michael Salla, “Was a Covert Attempt to Bomb Iran with Nuclear Weapons foiled by a Military Leak?” OpEdNews, 9/07/2007 http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__070907_was_a_covert_attempt.htm

Now that I am out of Pakistan, I can watch international news again. (General Musharraf, author of the doctrine of “enlightened moderation,” has shut down access to international cable channels, presumably because they undermine the fight against international terrorism.) I have been able to watch the same lawyer in Multan get arrested several times. I have seen Benazir Bhutto arrive in Islamabad, sticking her head out of an armored car in case anyone would like to make up for missing it in Karachi.

Watching the international media framing the events reminded me of a Bob Dylan song I was listening to on the plane:

If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.

I see Bush talking about his “freedom agenda,” Musharraf at the White House, arrested lawyers, turbaned Taliban taking over another town in northwest Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto asking the world to live up to its ideals, U.S. planes swooping over Afghanistan, Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein on behalf of President Reagan (that sure worked out real swell!), and, finally, Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, explaining that China can help us with North Korea, Saudi Arabia can help us against Iran, and that sometimes democracy promotion has to take a back seat to security concerns.

This is supposedly “realism,” not just in the sense of being tough rather than idealistic, but in following the analytic and prescriptive precepts of the realist paradigm in international relations. According to this paradigm, the main actors in international relations are states, states act out of rational motives of self-preservation, these self-regarding interests result largely from international power relations, and the internal structure of states is largely both independent of their international behavior and impervious to international influence. Hence promoting democracy is a noble endeavor that has limited effect and sometimes has to be subordinated to urgent security interests. In the case of Pakistan, the realist frame states, “Even if General Musharraf is a dictator, we need his help in the war against terror.”

I agree that promoting democracy (even if it were done sincerely and intelligently, which is not the usual practice) sometimes has less priority than other goals. In any case, democracy cannot function without internal security and the rule of law.

But don’t the reporters notice that the very pictures they are showing contradict the realist frame? General Musharraf has not suspended the constitution to fight terrorism. He has not even continued to fight terrorism while suspending the constitution for other reasons. Of course the Pakistan Army is happy to pocket the $100 million a year it receives for giving the U.S. basing rights and otherwise supporting the effort in Afghanistan (while undermining it in other — and cheaper — ways). The Pakistan Army is not about to commit suicide by openly defying the whole international community and cutting off support for NATO operations in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile Musharraf sent his police to arrest lawyers, liberal politicians, and human rights activists, while doing virtually nothing against those Taliban in their scary turbans, who are taking over Swat:

The imposition of emergency in Pakistan has not put any pressure on Taliban in Swat district. Taliban have taken over police stations in Matta, Khawazkhela and Charbagh. This scribe visited the Matta police station after the imposition of emergency in Pakistan. Taliban there have replaced the Pakistan’s flag with their own at the police station after more than 120 soldiers surrendered two days ago. Taliban commanders controlling Matta police station were not worried about the emergency.

Immediately after President Musharraf’s speech, the Pakistan Army swapped 25 Taliban fighters for 211 kidnapped soldiers in South Waziristan. There was a feeling of achievement among local militants over the banning of private TV channels all over the country as they think Musharraf had accepted their point of view in this matter.

Taliban leader Maulvi Fazlullah is moving around half of the Swat area like a ruler with full protocol. He has appointed his own ‘governors’ in Kabal, Matta and Khawazkhela. He has also ordered setting up of Islamic courts for providing justice in areas under his control.

Why is this happening? Because an illegitimate military regime could not motivate the security forces it has trained for jihad in defense of Islamic Pakistan to fight against domestic jihadis, even if it really wanted to. Realism assumes that states are constituted once and for all and that their capacity is a function of their economies and order of battle, not their legitimacy. But that is wrong. In Afghanistan the Afghan National Army, on which the U.S. has spent billions of dollars, is being undermined by mullahs, who in some areas will not pray at the funerals of fallen ANA soldiers. Pakistani troops and police are surrendering rather than fight the militants at the behest of a dictator beholden to the U.S.

That does not mean, as stated in the usual blackmail note passed by Pakistani generals to American leaders, that only the Army stands between Islamabad’s nuclear weapons and a mass Islamic revolutionary uprising. Support for a Taliban government is marginal in Pakistan. Even the mainstream Islamist parties like Jamaat-i Islami, who support the “resistance” in Afghanistan, are against it. But the military regime has not been able to provide an alternative legitimate leadership, and its own institutional interests prevent it from doing so.

The military and in particular its leader, General Musharraf, has a vital interest in staying in power. The generals believe their own rhetoric, that their personal and institutional interest is identical to the national interest, but few other Pakistanis do, and we should not either. The problem of how to handle the tribal agencies illustrates the dilemma.

For the past 30 years, initially using U.S. and Saudi covert action funds, the Pakistani military empowered jihadi groups in the tribal agencies. Along with the growth of a commercial economy based on smuggling, drug trafficking, and remittances, this support to militants undermined the tribal leadership through which the British colonial state and its successor, the Pakistani military state, controlled the border region. This closed area provided a deniable platform for the “covert” use of jihadis against the USSR, India, and Afghanistan.

When the U.S. demanded that the military join the “War on Terror,” it responded by sending in the army and arresting some Arabs and Uzbeks, while leaving the Taliban able to operate in Afghanistan. When the U.S. finally demanded more action, Islamabad claimed that the local Pashtuns supported the Taliban and that therefore military action alone would not work. Instead they reached an agreement with government-controlled “tribal leaders” in South Waziristan to control militant activity. Some in the Pakistani government sincerely hoped this agreement would work. It did not. Trying to regain control of the tribal agencies by reviving the tribal leadership is like trying to reconstitute the Mediterranean out of bouillabaisse. (My apologies to Marseille.)

Pashtuns in the tribal agencies are constantly sending messages complaining of how the militants are terrorizing them, how they don’t want to be used against Afghanistan, and how they are being blamed for the covert actions imposed on them by the Pakistani military. A few days ago, after I gave a lecture at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, two students from NWFP came up to me in a very agitated state, with the same protests, that Pakhtuns are not Taliban and that this “terrorism” had been imposed on them. These areas are ripe for political leadership that would oppose both the militants — absorbing many of the youths they are recruiting — and military rule. But creating conditions for such leadership to develop would require not sending in the military to bomb and shell the tribes, but legalizing political parties and social organizations (which are outlawed in the tribal agencies) and enabling the people of the tribal agencies to exercise self-government. Rather than give up its own power, the military balances the militants and the weakened tribes.

Only a transition toward more democratic civilian rule would create a constituency that would enable the Pakistani state not just to suppress militants by force but to offer a legitimate alternative to militancy. This the military regime will not and cannot do. Only a democratic transition, with its attendant uncertainties, offers a chance for Pakistan not so much to defeat militancy as to render it irrelevant. Genuine realism — which includes an analysis of the role of legitimacy in state capacity — requires support for the rule of law and transition to democracy.

Dylan again:

I met the sons of darkness and the sons of light
In the bordertowns of despair

And what were both the sons of darkness and the sons of light looking for in those bordertowns?

Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass
Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin’ through painted glass
For dignity.

Americocentrism dies hard.

So it’s difficult for us to appreciate that the things we care about — like the global war on terror — may not be the most important factors in Pakistani affairs.

Pakistan’s alliance with China, which supports Islamabad’s confrontation with India and underpins its hopes for economic growth in its populous heartland, is probably a lot more important to Islamabad than the dangerous, destabilizing, and thankless task of pursuing Islamic extremists on its remote and impoverished frontiers at Washington’s behest.

I think the professionals in the Bush administration understand the strategic dynamic of China moving toward the center of Asian affairs even as our disliked and counterproductive policies push us to the margins.

So I would not be surprised if Washington’s muted official response to date on the constitutional crisis in Pakistan is attributable to acquiesence to China’s insistence that Washington not add to the difficulties of its loyal ally, Musharraf.

Officially, therefore, we’re not doing anything for now.

Unofficially may be another matter.

Encouragement of a coup by Musharraf’s Number 2, General Ishfaq Pervaiz Kiyani is coming from somewhere, including the time-honored technique — at least familiar to readers of Chinese historical fiction — of trying to force his hand by announcing he had executed the coup even before it happened.

Even as Benazir Bhutto gauchely auditions for the role of America’s client, announces her confidence in Kiyani, and promises to divert Pakistani military energy and lives away from the heartland — and the Indian border — the wastes of Waziristan, I wonder how well she’ll fare in a country where Osama bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush, India is despised and the Taliban is honored, China is a core strategic and economic partner — and the United States and its concerns are unpopular and on the periphery.

For good reason, China is never far from the mind of Musharraf and Pakistan’s military elite.

China’s presence and interests in Pakistan dwarf America’s.

Beijing and Islamabad’s strategic priorities — countering India and nurturing economic development before confronting extremists in the hinterland — are in perfect sync.

The two nations grew even closer when the Bush administration abandoned the Pakistan-centric order of battle of the Global War on Terror and opted for closer ties with India in the service of what looks like a different strategic objective — an attempt to counter China’s growing influence in South Asia.

So, it would be rather ironic if the road to President Musharraf’s downfall began at a Chinese massage parlor in Islamabad.

It was, after all, the provocative kidnapping of 7 PRC nationals that compelled Musharraf — reportedly under heavy Chinese pressure — to abandon a policy of appeasement and compromise with Islamic militants at the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad and, in July of this year, launch a bloody assault that revealed the extent of the security crisis at the heart of the Pakistani military regime and displayed to the U.S. Musharraf’s — and Pakistan’s — wholehearted reliance on China.

In the speech announcing the state of emergency, Musharraf broke into English to tell us what he hoped we wanted to hear, evoking Lincoln as he tried to justify his move to the United States, the EU, and the Commonwealth as a response to judicial activism.

On the other hand, in his remarks in Urdu directed to the local audience as translated by Barnett Rubin , Musharraf cited the Lal Masjid mosque crisis — not the pursuit of al Qaeda and its allies in the border regions — as the primary instance of terrorism and extremism afflicting Pakistan.

And when he commiserated with the victims of terrorism, he took the opportunity to give a heartfelt shout-out to the Chinese, not to the United States:

Now. We saw the event of Lal Masjid in Islamabad where extremists took law into their own hands. In the heart of Pakistan – capital city – and to the great embarrassment of the nation around the world… These people – what didn’t they do? – these extremists. They martyred police. They took police hostage. They burned shops. The Chinese, who are such great friends of ours – they took the Chinese hostage and tortured them. Because of this, I was personally embarrassed. I had to go apologize to the Chinese leaders, “I am ashamed that you are such great friends and this happened to you”.

Now, about the standoff at the mosque.

One could describe it as Pakistan’s Waco — if Waco had taken place in the heart of Washington, D.C.

It didn’t get the attention it deserved. As the Times of India dryly observed of the attack that claimed at least 100 and perhaps 1000 lives:

…the week-long stand-off that ended in a massacre on Tuesday attracted little attention in the US, where focus is more on the debate over a pullout from Iraq. In fact, a news channel on Tuesday cut into a story on Lal Masjid to bring breaking news of a small airplane crash in Florida.

Lal Masjid was controlled by militant clerics who not only proclaimed their interpretation of sharia law—they enforced it.

An otherwise sympathetic observer declared:

One cannot have any objection to the Lal Masjid just preaching implementation of Sharia in Pakistan. So many organizations are doing so, one more cannot be objected to. The right of any Muslim to preach adoption of Sharia is one thing but to take the powers of implementing his own version of Sharia is another, and the latter is a function of the State.
…
Lal Masjid stands in revolt when it establishes its own Sharia courts, it passes judgments, and imprisons Pakistanis and foreigners.

Musharraf’s administration had its hands full with the militant, confrontational, and well-connected (to the intelligence services) cleric who ran the mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz.

The difficulties involved can be seen from this excerpt from a timeline of the mosque crisis compiled by B. Raman, an Indian China-watcher who is assiduous in washing Pakistan’s dirty linen on the site Intellibriefs:

January 22, 2007: Female students of the Jamia Hafsa madrasa attached to the Lal Masjid in Islamabad occupied a Children’s Library adjacent to their madrasa to protest against the demolition of seven unauthorised mosques constructed on roads in Islamabad by which President Pervez Musharraf often travels. The mosques were demolished on the advice of his personal security staff.

February 13, 2007: The authorities agreed to rebuild one of the demolished mosques to end the library standoff, but the students refused to vacate the library.

March 27, 2007: The female students, along with their male colleagues from the Jamia Faridia, another madrasa attached to the mosque, raided a house near the mosque and kidnapped a woman, her daughter-in-law and her six-month-old granddaughter for allegedly running a brothel. They were released after they “repented”.

March 28, 2007: Some students of the two madrasas took three policemen hostage in retaliation for the arrest of some students by the police. The hostages were released on March 29.

March 30, 2007: Some madrasa students visited CD and video shops in the capital and warned the shop owners that they should either switch to another business or face the “consequences”.

April 6, 2007: The Lal Masjid set up its own Sharia court. The mosque’s chief cleric, Abdul Aziz, warned of “thousands of suicide attacks” if the Government tried to shut it down.

April 9, 2007: The Sharia court issued a fatwa condemning the then Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar after newspapers pictured her hugging her parachuting instructor in France.

You get the picture. Escalating confrontation, with the government conciliating, accommodating, and backing down.

After exposing the skydiving outrage, the students of Lal Masjid turned their attention to another font of impurity—a Chinese-run massage parlor in Islamabad.

The epic was reported in great detail in Pakistan Today:

First, the abduction:

Male and female students of Jamia Faridia, Jamia Hafsa and Beaconhouse School System, in a joint operation, kidnapped the Chinese women and Pakistani men shortly after midnight Friday from a Chinese massage centre, working at House No 17, Street 4, F-8/3, alleging that they were running a brothel. …
…

Riding in three vehicles, the students … raided the massage centre located in the posh Islamabad sector. They overpowered three Pakistani males and guards posted there after thrashing them.

They, later, entered the building and ordered those present there to accompany them. On refusal, the students thrashed them and forcibly took them to the Jamia Hafsa compound. They accused the abducted people of rendering un-Islamic and unlawful services.
…

Ghazi [of Lal Masjid] said the China massage centre was involved in sex trade and complaints were being received about it since long. “Even housewives used to tell us by phone that the centre charges Rs 1,000 for massage while by paying Rs 500, something else was also available,” he said.

Then the anxious confab with the Chinese:

President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz were earlier given minute-by-minute reports of the negotiations regarding the release of the hostages. … The prime minister was in contact with the Islamabad administration and the Interior Ministry and getting minute-by-minute reports from State Minister for Interior Zafar Warriach.
…
The Chinese ambassador contacted President Hu Jintao two times during the 15-hour hostage drama, sources said. The ambassador called his president while holding talks with Pakistan Muslim League chief Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain at his residence.

… Sources quoted President Hu Jintao, expressing shock over the kidnapping of the Chinese nationals, has called for security for them. The ambassador informed his president about his talks with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain. The PML leader also got telephonic contact established between the hostages and the ambassador.

The ignominious conclusion:

The release came only after Deputy Commissioner Chaudhry Muhammad Ali and Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Zafar Iqbal, who held talks with the Lal Masjid administration, beseeched it for five hours and even touched the knees of some leading clerics while begging for the freedom of the abductees.

Finally, the tellingly sleazy detail:

The administration quietly let two “big shots”, Pakistani customers, go and released their vehicles, seized from outside the massage centre… The identity of these clients is not being disclosed.

Beyond President Hu Jintao’s tender regard for the security and livelihood of Chinese masseuses, there was obviously a larger issue at stake. China did not want to see its citizens and interests to become pawns in Pakistan’s internal strife.

It’s a non-trivial point for China, which lacks the military reach to effectively protect its overseas citizens itself, but does not want to see them turned into the bargaining chip of first resort for dissidents in dangerous lands like Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and etc. who are looking to get some leverage on the local government–or Beijing.

It looks like China demanded that Pakistan draw a red line at the abduction, extortion, and murder of its citizens.

A week after the kidnapping incident, Pakistan’s Federal Interior Minister was in Beijing.

Once more from the Intellibriefs timeline:

June 29, 2007: The “Daily Times” of Lahore wrote in an editorial as follows: “During his visit to Beijing, Sherpao got an earful from the Chinese Minister of Public Security, Zhou Yongkang, who asked Pakistan for the umpteenth time to protect Chinese nationals working in Pakistan. The reference was to the assault and kidnapping of Chinese citizens in Islamabad by the Lal Masjid vigilantes. The Chinese Minister called the Lal Masjid mob “terrorists” who targeted the Chinese, and asked Pakistan to punish the “criminals”.

One factor that would have intensified Chinese alarm and exasperation was a report that the attack on the massage parlor revealed a tie-up between Pakistan’s Islamic militants and Uighur separatists:

Mr.Sherpao also reported that the Chinese suspected that the raid on the massage parlour was conducted by some Uighur students studying in the Lal Masjid madrasa and that the Chinese apprehended that Uighur “terrorists” based in Pakistan might pose a threat to the security of next year’s Olympics in Beijing.

In early July Musharraf apparently was able to invoke China’s anger to overcome resistance within his armed forces, and move against Lal Masjid.

Even so, he was forced to employ troops personally loyal to him, as the Weekly Standard reported:

China applied enormous pressure to Musharraf. His previous attempts to order military strikes against the Lal Masjid had met with rebuffs. In late January, after the Pakistani army refused to raid the mosque, Musharraf ordered his air force to do so–only to see this order refused as well. Musharraf’s eventual solution was to send in 111 Brigade, which is personally loyal to him.

The mosque was encircled by 15,000 troops and the siege proceeded in a dilatory fashion…until three Chinese were murdered in remote Peshawar, apparently in retaliation for the siege.

China Daily reported:

Police officer Abdul Karim said that it was a robbery attempt.

But one witness said that attackers with face covered were shouting religious slogans when they opened fire on four Chinese nationals in a three-wheel auto-rickshaw factory at Khazana, a town some eight kilometers from Peshawar, the capital city of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province.

The Chinese outlets splashed the story all over the media, including their embassy websites, complete with atrocity photos—a treatment that the unfortunate demise of rickshaw factory employees doesn’t usually attract.

Tarique Niazi describes the denouement:

On July 2, barely a week after the abduction, the government ordered 15,000 troops around the mosque compound to flush out the militants. On July 4, it arrested the leader of the militants, Maulana Abdul Aziz … After apprehending the leader, government troops moved to choking off the militants’ supplies of food, water, and power. But as soon as word of the revenge killing of three Chinese on July 8 reached Islamabad, it created a “perfect storm” for Gen. Musharraf. Embarrassed and enraged, he reversed the troops’ strategy and ordered them, on July 10, to mount an all-out assault at the mosque, in which Aziz’s brother and his deputy, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, together with as many as 1,000 people, was killed.

Let’s recapitulate:

A trusted ally demands real, meaningful, and risky action by Pakistan against terrorism. Because of the importance of the ally, the proximity of the threat to the political and economic heart of the country, and the tactical and strategic merits of the action, Pakistan responds positively.

That ally is, of course, China.

Not the United States.

I can now confirm that Austin Police have access to Austin Energy customer usage information. The City of Austin, in response to my open records request, turned over an agreement titled “Utility Database Confidentiality Agreement.” This agreement gives Austin PD the right to search Austin Energy customer information without a warrant.

Here is the history. I received an email from the NORML listserv. An Austin resident was concerned the police were using customer information from Austin Energy. Allegedly, Austin PD was using electricity bills to get search warrants for marijuana grow operations. I, along with ACLU Texas, filed open information requests to confirm this story.

The City of Austin withheld further information pending an AG opinion. For those who are not familiar with Open Records requests, Attorney General Opinions are often sought to delay releasing information.

The City of Austin claims they will not release further information because it would “permit private citizens to anticipate weakness in a police department, avoid detection, jeopardize officer safety, and generally undermine police efforts to effectuate the laws of the State.”

It is a sad day for freedom when your power company becomes an agent for law enforcement. Is the danger from cannabis so great that we must give up our privacy?

‘I am one of those Pakistan-trained lawyers you have been hearing about. I have spent the last few days watching on television how my colleagues have been dragged, kicked, and beaten by hired hands, just because of their political views. My former law school professors, some of whom are now judges or justices, are under house arrest. There is a real sense in which I left my country of birth precisely because of obstacles to the free expression of political and religious views.

Americans, who enjoy constitutional liberties of long standing, should support the lawyers in their protest against the suspension of the Pakistani constitution. Lawyers are supposed to act as the guardians of the rule of law. They are not supposed to be prisoners and hostages to the powers that be. There is no excuse for Gen. Pervez Musharraf to treat educated, accomplished attorneys and barristers, many of them human rights workers such as the prominent woman activist, Asma Jahangir, this way. Ironically, the general has often posed as a supporter of women’s rights, as when he established quotas to ensure the presence of women in parliament. Yet, he is now moving against women intellectuals and politicians for being outspoken.

How much of the blame for this crackdown can be laid at the feet of the Bush administration’s unconditional support for the Pakistani military? The events of this week put the lie to the idea of a democratizing Pakistan with an independent judiciary and rule of law. If the US wants to play a fair and honest role in helping Pakistan achieve democracy and reducing the threat of religious extremism, here is what it can do.

The US should be earmarking aid to Pakistan not for military use but for funding and building schools for the millions of poor Pakistani children (some of them still from refugee Afghan families displaced by the US struggle with the Soviet Union in the Cold War). Such schools should stress east-west understanding. That would be one way of keeping children out of fundamentalist-funded madrassas and keeping them from being turned into Taliban. Provision of rural adult education through television and of free country-wide wi-fi internet access would also aid development. This educational aid would cost a pittance in comparison with what is being spent on military aid, and would be far less expensive than is fighting wars in the region.

Washington should keep pressure on the present government to hold free and fair elections for parliament on schedule. US aid for election observers and voter education would be well spent. The Bush administration has stressed democratization and the rule of law in the Muslim world. If it does not take practical steps toward those ideals in this crisis, America will altogether lose the confidence of the educated Muslim middle classes. If that happens, the ultimate winners may well be the Taliban and al-Qaeda. ‘

The U.S. establishment’s acceptance of a possible war with Iran shows that the folly that led to Iraq still rules Washington.

Nov. 6, 2007 | The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months.

Let’s repeat that. The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months.

The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America’s political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking.

The disturbing thing is that we have no excuse this time. Five years ago, a wounded, fearful and enraged America was ready to attack anybody, and Bush waved his red cape and steered the mad bull toward Iraq. We now know that was folly. The completely unnecessary invasion has so far resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and almost 4,000 Americans, severely destabilized the region, cost billions of dollars, and increased the threat of terrorism. Yet today we are blithely considering attacking a much larger Middle Eastern country for equally dubious reasons, and mainstream politicians and the media are once again going along. The American people have signed off on the conventional “wisdom.” In a recent poll, 52 percent of Americans say they would support attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This is surreal. It’s as if we’re back on Sept. 12 and Iraq never happened.

It is not surprising that the GOP is calling for a wider Mideast war. The party has nothing except fear to sell: Its initials might as well stand for “Grand Orgy of Paranoia.” But the acquiescence of many Democrats, and the mainstream media, shows just how intractable are the myths and fallacies about the Middle East and terrorism.

Four related misconceptions continue to distort our Middle East policy: the terrorism freakout, the Satan myth, the they’re-all-the-same fallacy, and the belief that we’re innocent.

In many ways the terrorism freakout is our founding error, one that predates 9/11 by decades. Our obsession with terrorism, our failure to place it in historical context, our hypocrisy in defining it, and our overreaction to it have marred our ability to craft an intelligent Middle East policy. It has seriously deformed our response to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis (still the region’s key conflict), provided much of the impetus for the Iraq war, and now is paving the way for possible war with Iran.

America’s response to Palestinian terrorism has set the tone for our subsequent responses to the phenomenon. No one condones terrorism: It is morally repugnant to kill civilians, no matter how legitimate the terrorists’ political goals may be. But by simply declaring that Palestinian terrorism was evil, and refusing to acknowledge or address the Palestinians’ legitimate grievances, America long ago locked itself into a morally incoherent, historically obtuse and ultimately self-defeating position. As Robert Fisk noted in “The Great War for Civilisation,” because of America’s pro-Israel bias, it has always seen Palestinian terrorism as “comfortably isolated from reason, cause or history … ‘Terrorism’ is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence — our violence — which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously.” The uncomfortable fact is that Israeli-Palestinian crisis is the crucial frame through which America has always understood the Middle East: Palestinians were the first of a long line of Arab and Muslim supervillains. Once we ourselves suffered a massive terrorist attack, our atavistic rage at these evildoers knew no bounds — and it was easy for the Bush administration to persuade us to attack Iraq.

Our overreaction to terrorism, combined with military triumphalism, found its supreme expression in Vice President Dick Cheney’s notorious “one percent doctrine,” which holds that if there is even a 1 percent chance that an enemy will acquire dangerous weapons, the United States must launch a preventive attack. As Iraq should have shown us, this doctrine is paranoid, delusional and self-defeating. (The doctrine is aptly named: It has a 1 percent chance of success.) Yet as the Iran war drums show, it still drives U.S. policy.

Hysteria about terrorism leads to a dangerous belief in the efficacy of military force. Of course U.S. forces can destroy any conventional adversary. But victory on the battlefield does not necessarily translate into foreign-policy success — especially not in an asymmetric war, like the one we face in Iraq and would face in Iran if we sent in ground forces. In fact, as Iraq should have shown us, we should wage war in the Middle East only as an absolute last resort. The costs are much too high and the risks of unintended consequences (Turkey and the Kurds, the crisis in Pakistan) too great. “Toughness” makes a great sound bite for opportunistic politicians, but in the real world it strengthens our terrorist enemies and ends up getting Americans killed for no reason.

Next comes the Satan myth, which says that our foes in the Middle East are uniquely evil, irrational, motiveless and impervious to deterrence. Just as the United States has seen the Palestinians as evil anti-Semites, not as complex actors with some legitimate historical grievances, so we saw Saddam as insane and undeterrable — and now are asked to believe the same thing about the mad mullahs of Iran. The terror attacks on 9/11, which were carried out by fanatics who really were impervious to deterrence, made the Satan myth practically untouchable. Lost in the rage and fear over the attacks was the fact that violent jihadists like al-Qaida are few in number and have almost no popular support. Claiming that Iraq, like al-Qaida, was part of an “axis of evil,” Bush used the Satan myth to sell the war against Iraq. And it now provides the key support for a war with Iran. If Iran is an insane, fanatical, undeterrable state, the equivalent of al-Qaida, then if follows that we must consider attacking it to prevent it from acquiring nuclear bombs.

The myth of a demonic, irrational, powerful Iran has no basis in fact. Iran, as Juan Cole has pointed out, “has not launched an aggressive war against a neighbor since 1785 and does not have a history of military expansionism. Its population is a third that of the United States and its military is small and weak.” Nor is it bent on fighting the United States or Israel to the death. Iran made a major peace offer to the United States in 2003, offering a comprehensive diplomatic settlement, including ending its support for Hamas and recognition of Israel, in exchange for normal relations. The Bush administration, smugly certain that it was about to get rid of the entire regime, refused to talk.

Nor is Iran undeterrable. It obviously has significant differences with the United States. But it is a rational actor, concerned like any other state to maximize its regional power and minimize threats to its existence. As Trita Parsi, author of the new book “Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the U.S.,” argued in a recent piece in the Nation, “a careful study of Iran’s actions — not just its rhetoric — reveals systematic, pragmatic and cautious maneuvering toward a set goal: decontainment and the re-emergence of Iran as a pre-eminent power in the Middle East.” This is why retired Gen. John Abizaid recently said that America could live with a nuclear Iran.

Under the specious heading of “Islamofascism,” we have dangerously conflated completely different regimes and non-state actors — this is the “they’re all the same” fallacy. The Bush administration has aggressively promoted the idea that every Mideast state or militant movement that isn’t on the same side as the United States or Israel poses the same threat as al-Qaida — or simply asserted that those states are synonymous with al-Qaida, as the Bush administration did before the Iraq war. This is absurd and violates the first principle of both statesmanship and generalship: See the situation clearly and objectively. It leads to completely false assessments of entities like Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, and leads us to make far more enemies than we need to in the Arab-Muslim world.

Iran has no more to do with al-Qaida than Iraq did. Iran sponsors Hamas and Hezbollah, which have employed terrorism, but their fight is with Israel, not the United States. If we attack Iran because it supports Hezbollah, we might as well declare war on Kurdistan because it abets the PKK’s far more deadly guerrilla campaign against Turkey. By treating Iran, or national-liberation groups like Hamas, as if they were al-Qaida, the United States is making an elementary and quite dangerous category error.

The final error is our invincible belief in our innocence, which derives from our almost complete ignorance of the region’s history and its people. Americans can entertain notions of marching smartly into some Middle Eastern country, killing a bunch of evil ragheads, fixing things up, shaking hands all around, and marching out because most Americans simply have no knowledge of Middle Eastern history or America’s long and often shameful record of imperialist and colonialist meddling. Perhaps Americans might view Iran differently if more of them knew that in 1953, America and Great Britain overthrew their democratically elected leader and installed a bloody but pro-U.S. tyrant, the Shah. The 1979 revolution that brought Khomeini to power, and put Iran and United States on the collision course that has lasted to this day, was a direct result of that infamous coup (which we engineered because we wanted cheap Iranian oil). Neither Iranians nor anyone else in the Middle East has forgotten such matters — why should they? Until we understand and come to terms with our often-ugly track record in the region, we will be doomed to play the part of Graham Greene’s haplessly idealistic Quiet American, blundering into places we don’t understand, not knowing why the natives don’t like us, and making things infinitely worse.

There are not many indications that Americans, whether Democrats or Republicans, can break away from these persistent fallacies about the Middle East and terrorism. There are a few glimmers of hope, however. Sen. Barack Obama broke decisively with the establishment position last week, stating that if elected, he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy with Iran” without preconditions. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel took the same position in a letter he sent to Bush calling for “direct, unconditional and comprehensive talks with the Government of Iran.” And in a noteworthy column, ultra-establishment pundit Fareed Zakaria recently attacked the entire set of assumptions behind the campaign to whip up war fever against Iran. “The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality,” Zakaria wrote in Newsweek.

When the US decided that its backyard would in future be a greater Middle East – from Pakistan to Morocco – it imagined that it could rearrange the region to suit itself. The results have been disastrous and will be long-lasting.

The United States undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns, said this year: “Ten years ago Europe was the epicentre of American foreign policy. This was how things stood from April 1917, when Woodrow Wilson sent one million American troops to the Western Front, through to President Clinton’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. For the better part of the 20th century, Europe was our primary, vital focus.” But, he added, everything had changed and the Middle East was now, for President George Bush and his successors, “the place that Europe once was for the administrations of the 20th century” (1).

President Bush had said much the same a while earlier: “The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life” (2).

This broader Middle East is an ill-defined area extending from Pakistan, through the Horn of Africa to Morocco. Since 9/11 it has become the main theatre for the deployment of US military power and the decisive, even the sole, battlefield in what the US sees as a global conflict. The region’s oil resources and strategic position, and the presence of Israel, have made it a US priority, particularly since the French and British began to withdraw after 1956. As Philippe Croz-Vincent has pointed out in a subtle analysis of the “American moment”, the Middle East has replaced Latin America as the US backyard (3). But with a major difference: Latin America was never a crucial battlefield in a third world war.

The landscape of the Middle East has been redrawn. This was the objective of Pentagon strategists and the neo-conservatives; but it is doubtful whether the results match their dreams of remodelling the region to secure the lasting hold that the French and British established after the first world war.

Western forces are directly involved in ferocious conflicts across the broader Middle East. Afghanistan has collapsed into chaos, dragging US and Nato troops down with it. It will be hard to heal the wounds in Iraq, where religious and ethnic rivalries and resistance to foreign occupation have caused hundreds of thousands of casualties – more, according to some observers, than the Rwandan genocide. Lebanon is mired in a silent civil war between Fuad Siniora’s government and the opposition, centred on Hizbullah and Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement; despite a significant UN presence, the war with Israel could resume at any moment. Colonisation and repression have accelerated the geographical and social fragmentation of Palestine, and the possibly irreversible collapse of the national movement. Since Ethiopia’s US-backed intervention in December 2006, Somalia has been called the “new front in the war on terror”. Then there are Darfur, the tensions in Pakistan, a “terrorist threat” in North Africa and the possibility of a new confrontation between Syria and Israel.

A self-fulfilling prophecy

All these conflicts have been subsumed into a US world view that projects a specific meaning on to them. During and after the cold war, the US (like the Soviet Union) viewed any crisis in the light of the East-West conflict. So the issue in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s was not the Sandinista struggle against a brutal dictatorship in an attempt to build a fairer society, but the danger that the country might become part of an “evil empire” (4). This cost the people of Nicaragua a decade of war and destruction. The US is indifferent to the problems of the Palestinians, the crisis in Somalia or the sectarian conflict in Lebanon; it is fixated on a global confrontation between good and evil. And this discourse feeds al-Qaida’s vision of a continuing war against Jews and crusaders.

This dichotomy has turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, which local forces have exploited for their own ends. Somalia’s transitional federal government – corrupt, incompetent warlords – persuaded the White House that international terrorism was at work (5). The US responded by encouraging Ethiopian military intervention in an attempt to expel the Union of Islamic Courts forces that had seized Mogadishu six months previously (see page 4). Global preconceptions eclipsed the real internal situation. Christian Ethiopia’s invasion of its Muslim neighbour served only to enhance the credibility of ultra-radical Islamist groups (6).

Lebanon is a fragile entity that depends upon a subtle sectarian alchemy. By deciding to support one side against the other, the US and France made any internal resolution more difficult. Lebanon has become a battleground where the West and its allies can confront Iran and Syria. And any compromise, however necessary, is in danger of being perceived as a victory for the “forces of evil”.

As they have multiplied, the conflicts have become interrelated. Weapons, combatants and skills move across porous frontiers, sometimes in the wake of hundreds of thousands of refugees driven into exile by the fighting. Over the past two years combat techniques pioneered in Iraq have spread to Afghanistan – the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) against troop transports, and suicide bombings, which were unknown during the Soviet occupation (and which have now also spread to Algeria).

This summer, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon, hundreds of fighters, many of them foreigners who fought in Iraq, held out for more than three months against the Lebanese army. There are thousands of Arab, Pakistani and central Asian combatants now on the loose, all trained in Iraq. Others, trained by the US and Pakistan to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, migrated to terrorist groups in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere, as well as into al-Qaida. All these wars have encouraged a profitable trade: weapons handed out to the Iraqi security forces are now in the hands of Turkish criminals (7).

Weakened states

All this, on top of decades of dictatorship and corruption, has helped weaken states in the region. Some, like Afghanistan, have collapsed. The current break-up of Iraq is not due solely to the present conflict. A 13-year embargo (1990-2003) undermined the state and opened the door to Salafist (Sunni) influence, which filtered in along clandestine routes from Jordan with food, medicine, weapons and radical ideas (8). Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Syria, unable to ignore the instability on their borders, are all directly or indirectly pursuing their own agendas within Iraq. Attempts to rebuild central authority in Lebanon have fizzled out. The Palestinian Authority is dependent upon foreign military and economic aid, and the support of the Israeli government. Areas like Iraqi Kurdistan and Gaza are becoming autonomous and feeding the separatist ambitions of Turkey’s Kurds and the Baluch of Iran and Pakistan.

The unprecedented influence of armed groups makes any negotiation more difficult. They hold the whip hand in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Hizbullah dominates Lebanon; Hamas controls Gaza. They have proved formidably effective against the US in Iraq and against Nato in Afghanistan.

In Lebanon, Hizbullah held out for 33 days against the Israelis and changed the rules of the game: for the first time since 1948-49 a significant number of Israeli civilians were forced to abandon their homes. Despite being holed up in Gaza, Hamas is still capable of launching rockets into Israel (9).

Rudimentary, but effective and easily replaceable, munitions (IEDs, Qassam rockets, anti-tank weapons) define the limits of US and Israeli military power.

The late Ze’ev Schiff, military correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, gave a realistic assessment: “Even if we declare dozens of times that Hamas is under pressure and wants a ceasefire, it will not erase the fact that in the battle for Sderot, Israel has in effect been defeated… [it] is experiencing something in Sderot that it has not experienced since the war of independence, if ever: the enemy has silenced an entire city and brought normal life there to a halt” (10).

The political impasse in Palestine, the fragmentation of states and US military interventions have created a suicidal sense of despair and lend weight to the extremist assertions of al-Qaida.

On 31 August 2006, following the kidnapping in Gaza by an unknown group of two Fox News journalists, the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan published an article on the third generation of Islamist militants emerging in Palestine to challenge Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They were described as having no mass support, rejecting any compromise, refusing to play by the rules of the political game, not targeting just Israelis and not limiting their demands to Palestine. The ability of groups claiming allegiance to al-Qaida to develop in Iraq and Afghanistan, to penetrate the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and establish themselves in North Africa and Somalia demonstrates the pressure that ideological extremism is capable of exerting on fragile borders.

The nationalism that has structured the broader Middle East since 1918 is now under threat from the resurgence of ethnic and religious identity – a process encouraged, consciously or not, by General David Petraeus, the current US commander in Iraq, who led the 101st Airborne Division that captured Mosul in 2003.

One of his first decisions was to create an elected council to represent the city, with separate polls for Kurds, Arabs, Turkmens and Christians. No mention of Iraqis. By reducing the region to a mosaic of minorities, US policy forces everyone to identify with their community, to the detriment of any national or other loyalty (11). This undermines national cohesion and fosters conflict in Iraq now and possibly in Syria and Iran tomorrow. It encourages outside regional or international parties to intervene, manipulating local factions in pursuit of their own interests. Israel has been particularly guilty of this since the 1980s.

During Bush’s first term, the neocons developed the doctrine of “constructive instability” in the Middle East (12). As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said while Israel was bombing Lebanon in July 2006: “What we’re seeing here is, in a sense, the growing – the birth pangs of a new Middle East; and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we’re pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East.”

The cynicism of her remarks provoked caustic comments at the time, but she was, in a sense, right: since 9/11 we have witnessed the emergence of a new Middle East that bears no resemblance to anything that US politicians might have envisaged, and which has become a major and lasting destabilising factor in the world.

Translated by Donald Hounam

(1) http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/burn s.html

(2) State of the Union address, 11 January 2007;

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rele ases/2007/01/20070110-7.html

(3) Philippe Droz-Vincent, Vertiges de la puissance. Le moment américain au Moyen-Orient, La Découverte, Paris, 2007.

(4) Speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, on 8 March 1983, Ronald Reagan warned against the temptation “to label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding.”

(5) See Gérard Prunier, “CIA coup in Somalia”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, September 2006.

(6) See Roland Marchal, “Somalie : un nouveau front antiterroriste?”, Les Etudes du CERI, 135, Centre d’études et de recherches internationales, Paris, June 2007.

(7) “US guns sent to Iraq used for crimes in Turkey”, International Herald Tribune, 31 August 2007.

(8) See Vali Nasr, The Shia revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future, Norton, New York, 2006.

(9) On 7 October a Katyusha-type missile, more accurate and of longer range than the Qassam, was fired from Gaza into Israel.

(10) “An Israeli defeat in Sderot”, Haaretz, Tel Aviv, 8 June 2007.

(11) There are several tribal confederations that include both Sunni and Shia; membership of a particular confederation overrides Sunni or Shia identity.

Torture is defined in many ways. To the US administration, nothing that it ever does is torture. In keeping with the notorious “Torture Memo” of August 2002, drafted primarily by Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief counsel David Addington, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (as the administration euphemistically defines its forays into torture) only actually become torture if the suffering produced is equivalent to organ failure or even death.

As a result, Dick Cheney was well within his comfort zone when, on a conservative radio show last October, he responded to a dismissively phrased question about waterboarding — “Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” — with the response, “Well, it’s a no-brainer for me.” He added, “But for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture” (courtesy of the Washington Post), and concluded with the administration’s predictable mantra, “We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in.”

To others, including the State Department, waterboarding is clearly torture, as the Department declares every year when it condemns other countries for subjecting prisoners to “a dunk in the water.” But while it should be clear to all but the most vindictively brain-washed that waterboarding and other techniques which have been used in Guantánamo, and which are still part of the CIA’s arsenal (including the prolonged use of stress positions, extreme temperature manipulation, and profound sleep deprivation) are also torture, especially when their use is combined, holding a man in solitary confinement for several years is somehow seen as a soft option.

This is in spite of the fact that, when approved by Donald Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo, Defense Department lawyers warned that isolation was “not known to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days.” The lawyers’ warnings, it should also be noted, echoed the opinion expressed in the CIA’s 1963 KUBARK Manual (with its notorious section on counter-intelligence interrogation), in which the agency warned of the “profound moral objection” of applying “duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage.”

My concern with the effects of prolonged solitary confinement hit me abruptly this week when I read — in the New York Times, one of the few media outlets to cover the story — that the case of Ali al-Marri, the last “enemy combatant” on US soil, was causing some consternation to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Virginia.

A Qatari national and a resident alien in the United States, al-Marri had studied computer science in Peoria, Illinois in 1991, and had legally returned to the United States on September 10, 2001, with his residency in order, to pursue post-graduate studies, bringing his family (his wife and five children) with him. Three months later he was arrested and charged with fraud and making false statements to the FBI, but in June 2003, a month before he was due to stand trial for these charges in a federal court, the prosecution dropped the charges and informed the court that he was to be held as an “enemy combatant” instead.

He was then moved to a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was held incommunicado for 16 months, and where, according to statements eventually filed by his lawyers (see below), he was subjected to “inhumane, degrading, and physically and psychologically abusive treatment.” Held in “complete isolation” in a bare cell measuring nine feet by six feet in an otherwise unoccupied cell block, he was subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme temperature manipulation, was frequently deprived of food and water, and was only allowed outside for “recreation” (also alone) three times a week “when deemed to be ‘compliant.'” Reinforcing his isolation, his cell contained nothing but a Koran, a “suicide blanket” and a thin mattress, and even the window was blocked out, preventing him from ever seeing natural light or knowing the time of day.

Al-Marri also stated that, during the first year of his imprisonment in the brig, he was “interrogated repeatedly,” and he explained that his interrogators “falsely told [him] that four of his brothers and his father were in jail because of him, and promised that they would all be released if he cooperated with them,” and also “threatened to send [him] to Egypt or to Saudi Arabia where, they told him, he would be tortured and sodomized and where his wife would be raped in front of him.”

In August 2003, representatives of the International Red Cross were finally allowed to meet with al-Marri, and two months later he was finally permitted to meet with a lawyer, but despite sporadic visits from the Red Cross and his legal representatives, the extreme isolation in which he has been held (and the perpetuation of the ill-treatment outlined above) has been barely mitigated. Including the six months that he spent in isolation in Peoria County Jail and the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, before being transferred to Charleston, he has now spent four years and ten months (58 times the amount of time recommended by Defense Department lawyers) in solitary confinement.

While this is not unique — the alleged “high-value” al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah has been in solitary since March 2002, for example, and several Guantánamo detainees have also spent a substantial amount of time in a similar situation (including, currently, the British resident Shaker Aamer, who has been alone in an isolation block since August 2005) — al-Marri, as a US resident, is supposed to be protected from this sort of treatment.

The only comparable case, and one which bears close scrutiny, is that of Jose Padilla, the only other “enemy combatant” to be held for a substantial period of time on the US mainland. A US citizen, Padilla was held in the Charleston brig for three and a half years, where, crucially, the extreme isolation to which he was subjected, combined with sensory deprivation and the use of psychotropic drugs, led to the complete disintegration of his mind, according to several psychiatrists who evaluated his mental state.

According to one of al-Marri’s lawyers, Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, his client’s mental disintegration has not been quite so severe, although he has been described as suffering “severe damage to his mental and emotional well-being, including hypersensitivity to external stimuli, manic behavior, difficulty concentrating and thinking, obsessional thinking, difficulties with impulse control, difficulty sleeping, difficulty keeping track of time, and agitation.” While this is a distressing litany of the symptoms to be expected from prolonged solitary confinement, it may be that al-Marri’s relative sanity compared to Padilla (who was described by his guards as “so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for ‘a piece of furniture'”) is sufficient to explain why his story has not been so newsworthy, but it seems likely that his case has also been largely ignored because he is a resident alien rather than a US citizen, and because his story is not so glamorous.

Unlike Padilla, who shot to undying fame when he was accused of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” in a US city, al-Marri has no such tag to identify him. The presidential order which declared him an “enemy combatant” stated simply that he was closely associated with al-Qaeda and presented “a continuing, present, and grave danger to the national security of the United States,” and the “charges” against him have fluctuated: at various times it has been claimed by the government that he attended an al-Qaeda training camp, that he met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the self-confessed architect of 9/11, and that he had connections to the al-Qaeda financier Mustafa al-Hawsawi. It has also been alleged that he met Osama bin Laden, and that, after meeting him, pledged that he would kill Americans, that he volunteered for a “martyr mission,” and that he was working as an al-Qaeda sleeper agent in the US at the time of his capture. Rather more prosaically, it was also alleged that he had documents related to jihadi activities on his computer, including information on hydrogen cyanide (used in chemical weapons), lectures by Osama bin Laden and a cartoon of planes crashing into the World Trade Center.

Crucially, however, none of these claims are necessarily reliable. As Jonathan Hafetz explained to me when I spoke to him on Friday (and as has been apparent since Newsweek reported on it in June 2003), most of the supposed intelligence against al-Marri came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in March 2003, just three months before al-Marri was upgraded from an alleged credit card fraudster to a major terror suspect. As I discussed at length in an article in July, “Gitmo’s Tangled Web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majid Khan, Dubious US Convictions and a Dying Man,” KSM stated during his tribunal at Guantánamo in March this year that he had given false information about other people while being tortured, and, though he was not allowed to elaborate, I traced in my article several possible victims of these false confessions, including Majid Khan, one of 13 supposedly “high-value” detainees transferred with KSM to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, Saifullah Paracha, a Pakistani businessman and philanthropist held in Guantánamo, and his son Uzair, who was convicted in the United States on dubious charges in November 2005, and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

It’s possible, therefore, that al-Marri is another victim of KSM’s tangled web of tortured confessions, but whether or not this is true, the correct venue for such discussions is in a court of law, and not in leaks and proclamations from an administration that appears to be intent on holding him without charge or trial for the rest of his life. Since November 2005, when the administration dropped its “dirty bomb” allegations against Padilla and charged him with the far lesser crimes of “conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim people in a foreign country, conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists, and providing material support for terrorists,” for which he was convicted — pending appeal — in August this year, al-Marri has had the painful distinction of being the only US “enemy combatant” held on American soil.

The Padilla verdict caused outrage amongst those who were rightly concerned that the judge had forbidden all mention of the three and a half years that a US citizen had spent in mind-destroying isolation without charge or trial, but al-Marri’s case is, arguably, even more significant. Under the cover of his perceived second-class status as a resident alien rather than a US citizen, the administration appears to be hoping that the Fourth Circuit judges will endorse what Jonathan Hafetz described to me as “the most radical and far-reaching claim of the imperial presidency: that the President can seize any person in America and imprison him for life, without charge and without evidence, based solely upon his say-so.”

This, then, is why the news that al-Marri’s case was being scrutinized by the Fourth Circuit judges seized my attention so vigorously. While the Supreme Court will undoubtedly beckon if the verdict goes the government’s way, the Fourth Circuit judges are discussing an issue that should be of paramount importance to all Americans: their right not to be seized on a Presidential whim, and held forever without charge or trial.

It is, moreover, not the first time that the Fourth Circuit judges have looked at al-Marri’s case. In June, by a majority of 2 to 1, three judges in the Fourth Circuit appeals court delivered the following damning verdict on the President’s presumed ability to detain Americans (whether citizens or resident aliens) at will. “Put simply,” they declared, “the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process, and this is so even if he calls them ‘enemy combatants.'”

The judges had apparently been swayed by the arguments presented by Jonathan Hatefz and his colleagues, who insisted, as they have maintained all along, that the President “lacks the legal authority to designate and detain al-Marri as an ‘enemy combatant’ for two principal reasons”; firstly, because the Constitution “prohibits the military imprisonment of civilians arrested in the United States and outside an active battlefield,” and secondly, because, although a district court previously held that the President was authorized to detain al-Marri under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (the September 2001 law authorizing the President to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those involved in any way with 9/11), Congress explicitly prohibited “the indefinite detention without charge of suspected alien terrorists in the United States” in the Patriot Act, which followed five weeks later. Even more critically, Congress actually rejected a provision in a prior draft of the bill, which would have permitted the Attorney General to detain without charge any individual he “has reason to believe may commit, further, or facilitate acts [of terrorism],” insisting instead that suspects be charged “with a criminal offense or an immigration violation within seven days of their arrest” (that’s seven days, note, not 2155 days — as of November 5, 2007 — in solitary confinement).

The verdict in June — a triumph for those who realized how crucial the al-Marri case was — lasted only until the government appealed. Instead of three judges, the Fourth Circuit court has now convened en banc to reconsider al-Marri’s indefinite detention without trial, and this critical decision — a last bulwark, effectively, against the whims of a dictatorial President — now rests in the hands of nine judges in one of the most conservative courts in the land.

Unexpectedly, however, the signs are not all bad. As the New York Times explained, “based on the pointed, practical and frequently passionate questioning” during Wednesday’s hearing, the judges were “divided and troubled, and it was not clear which was the majority was leaning.” Some responses were predictable. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, for example, remarked that civil liberties groups had “stirred up needless anxiety” about the President’s powers. “We’re not talking about an indiscriminate roundup,” he said. “We’re talking about two people in six years [al-Marri and Padilla] with undisputed ties to al-Qaeda.” In response, however, Judge Robert L. Gregory stated that the case was one of “constitutional principle,” and a representative of the government, Gregory J. Garre, faced tough questions about the administration’s position. Judge M. Blane Michael asked, “How long can you keep this man in custody?” and when Garre replied that it could “go on for a long time,” depending on the duration of the “war” with al-Qaeda, Judge Michael stated, “It looks like a lifetime.”

Under questioning from Judge William B. Traxler Jr., who inquired about the circumstances required for holding people in secret detention, Garre blustered that al-Marri had been given an opportunity to rebut the government’s allegations, but had “squandered” the opportunity. This was not strictly true. Al-Marri had indeed been given an opportunity to face his accusers in court, but, as his lawyers pointed out, the burden was actually on the government to prove its accusations. “How is a person who is held incommunicado to challenge these things?” Judge Traxler asked, to silence from Garre.

With the judges’ overall opinions unclear, al-Marri, his lawyers, and all responsible American citizens will have to wait for the verdict to be announced, which could be before the end of the year. I can only hope that the judges have listened carefully to the arguments made by his lawyers. As Jonathan Hafetz explained to me, “Mr. al-Marri’s four-plus years of solitary confinement in a navy prison crosses a line that should never be crossed a civilized society, and cannot be accepted in a nation, like America, committed to basic human rights and the principles of its Constitution.”

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

Last Wednesday, the Federal Reserve dropped its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points to 4.5 per cent citing ongoing weakness in the housing sector. As expected, the stock market rallied and the Dow Jones Industrial Average went up137 points. Unfortunately, Bernanke’s “low interest” stardust wasn’t enough to buoy the markets through the rest of the week.

On Thursday, the hammer fell. The Dow plunged 362 points in one afternoon on increasing fears of inflation, a slowdown in consumer spending, a steadily weakening dollar and persistent problems in the credit markets. By day’s end, the Fed was forced to dump another $41 billion into the banking system to forestall a major breakdown. This is the most money the Fed has pumped into the financial system since 9/11/2001 and it shows how dire the situation really is.

Why do the banks need such a huge infusion of credit if they are as “rock solid” as Bernanke says?

As most people now realize, the mortgage industry is on life-support. Many of the ways that the banks were generating profits have vanished overnight. The “securitization” of debt (mortgages, car loans, credit card debt etc) has ground to a halt. What had been a booming multi-billion dollar per-year business is now a dwindling part of the banks’ revenues. Investors are steering clear of anything even remotely associated to real estate.

Additionally, the banks are holding an estimated $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities and derivatives for which there is currently no market. This is compounded by $350 billion in “off balance sheets” operations — which are collateralized with dodgy long-term mortgage-backed securities — that provide funding for “short-term” asset-backed commercial paper. ASCP has shriveled by $275 billion in the last 10 weeks leaving the banks with gargantuan liabilities. Bernanke was forced to add $41 billion to keep the banking system from slipping beneath the waves. But that’s just a short-term fix. In the long run, the Fed has less chance of stopping the market from correcting than it does of stopping a runaway truck by standing in its path. Besides, the Fed cannot purchase the banks’ bad investments (CDOs, MBSs, or CP) nor can it reflate the multi-trillion dollar the housing bubble. All it can do is provide more cheap credit and hope the problems go away.

So far, the lower rates haven’t even decreased the price of the 30-year mortgage or made refinancing any cheaper. In truth, they’re just a desperate attempt to perpetuate consumer borrowing while the banks figure out how to offload their enormous debts. That’s what Paulson’s $80 billion “Banker’s Bankruptcy Fund” is really all about; it’s just the repackaging of subprime junk so it can be passed off to credulous investors. Fortunately, the public has wised up and isn’t buying into this latest fraud. As a result, the banks have taken another blow to their already-flagging credibility.

In the last two months, the pool of qualified mortgage applicants has contracted, as has the market for merger and acquisition deals (private equity). So the banks are probably doing more with the Fed’s $41 billion injection than just beefing up their reserves and issuing new loans. The market analysts at Minyanville.com summed it up like this:

“Banks are taking the liquidity the Fed is forcing out there through the discount window and repos. After using it to shore up the declining value of their assets, they have excess to lend out. Finding no traditional borrowers that want to buy a house or build a factory, the new rules the Fed has set forth allows the banks to pass this liquidity onto their broker dealer subsidiaries in much greater quantities. These broker dealers are lending thus to hedge funds and margin buyers who are speculating in stocks. Remember, the Fed is powerless unless it can find people to borrow the credit it wants them to spend. By definition, the last ones willing to take that credit are the most speculative.”

This is a likely scenario given the fact that the stock market continues to fly high despite the surge of bad news on everything from the falling dollar to the geopolitical rumblings in the Middle East. Last month, the Fed modified its rules so that the banks could provide resources to their off-balance sheets operations (SIVs and conduits). If the Fed is willing to rubber-stamp that type of monkey-business; then why would they mind if the money was stealthily “back-doored” into the stock market via the hedge funds?

This might explain why the hedge funds account for as much as 40 to 50 per cent of all trading on an average day. It also explains why the stock market is overheating.

The charade cannot go on forever. And it won’t. Rate cuts do not address the underlying problem which is bad investments. The debts must be accounted for and written off. Nothing else will do. That doesn’t mean that Bernanke will suddenly decide to stop savaging the dollar or flushing hundreds of billions of dollars down the investment bank toilet. He probably will. But, eventually, the blow-ups in the housing market will destabilize the financial system and send the banks and over-leveraged hedge funds sprawling. Bernanke’s low interest “giveaway” will amount to nothing.

Bloomberg News ran a story last week which sheds more light on the jam the banks now find themselves in:

“Banks shut out of the market for short-term loans are finding salvation in a government lending program set up to revive housing during the Great Depression. Countrywide Financial Corp., Washington Mutual Inc., Hudson City Bancorp Inc. and hundreds of other lenders borrowed a record $163 billion from the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks in August and September as interest rates on asset-backed commercial paper rose as high as 5.6 percent. The government-sponsored companies were able to make loans at about 4.9 percent, saving the private banks about $1 billion in annual interest.”

Whoa. So, now that the credit markets have frozen over, the banks are going to the government with begging bowl in hand? So much for “moral hazard”.

Commercial paper is short-term notes that businesses use for daily operations. Because much of this CP is backed by mortgage-backed securities the banks have been having trouble rolling it over. (Refinancing) So — unbeknownst to the public — various banks have been borrowing from the government-sponsored Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB) so they can cut their losses (or stay afloat?) The FHLB has extended $163 billion of loans to them, which means that the risks that are inherent in supporting “dodgy banks that make bad bets” has been transferred to FHLB’s investors. The danger, of course, is that-when investors find out that FHLB is mixed up with these shaky banks, they are liable to sell their shares and trigger a collapse of the system.

Citi’s Woes

Over the weekend, Citigroup’s CEO Chuck Prince got the axe. Citigroup, which boasts more than 300,000 staff worldwide, has lost more than 20 per cent of its market value from bad bets in sub-prime mortgages. According to the Times Online: “The Securities and Exchange Commission may investigate whether it improperly juggled its books to hide the full extent of the problem.”

“Juggled” is not a word that is taken lightly on Wall Street where traders are now bracing for another sell-off of financial stocks. Mr. Prince is not alone in the unemployment line either. He’s be accompanied by Merrill Lynch’s former boss, Stanley O’ Neal who got the boot last week when his firm reported $8.4 billion in write-downs. Deutsche Bank analysts now predict that Merrill may write off another $10 billion of losses related to its portfolio of sub-prime debts. That would wipe out 8 full quarters of earnings and represent the largest loss in Wall Street history.

The news is bleak. The systemic rot is appearing everywhere presaging ongoing losses for the financial giants and a long-downward spiral for the markets. The banks are currently under-regulated, over-leveraged and under capitalized.

Former Fed chief Paul Volcker summarized the overall economic situation last week at the second annual summit of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. In his speech he said:

“Altogether, the circumstances seem as dangerous and intractable as I can remember.Boomers are spending like there is no tomorrow. Homeownership has become a vehicle for borrowing and leveraging as much as a source of financial security.. As a Nation we are consumingabout 6 per cent more than we are producing. What holds it all together? – High consumption – high leverage – government deficits – What holds it all together is a really massive and growing flow of capital from abroad. A flow of capital that today runs to more than $2 billion per day.” The nation is facing “huge imbalances and risks.”

Volcker is right. The country is in a bigger pickle than any time in its 230 year history. The credit storm that was engineered at the Federal Reserve has swept across the planet and is now descending on commercial real estate, credit card debt, and the plummeting bond insurers industry. These are the next shoes to drop and the tremors will be felt throughout the broader economy.

As this article is being written, Reuters is reporting that Citigroup may be forced to write-down as much as $11 billion in subprime mortgage-related losses!

Reuters: “Citigroup announced today significant declines since September 30, 2007 in the fair value of the approximately $55 billion in U.S. sub-prime related direct exposures in its Securities and Banking (S&B) business. Citi estimates that, at the present time, the reduction in revenues attributable to these declines ranges from approximately $8 billion to $11 billion (representing a decline of approximately $5 billion to $7 billion in net income on an after-tax basis).”

Citigroup’s statement indicates a willingness on its part to come clean with its investors but, in fact, they know that the situation is fluid and there’ll be hefty losses in the future. Mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) will continue to be downgraded as time goes by. According to the Financial Times, one banker was having so much difficulty getting a bid on subprime securities; he found the only way he could get rid of them was through “barter. He resorted to using a tactic more normally associated with third world markets than the supposedly sophisticated arena of high finance. ‘Barter is the only thing that works,’ he chuckled, ‘It’s like the Dark Ages'” The article continues:

“Never mind the fact that the risky tranches of subprime-linked debt have fallen 80 per cent since the start of the year; in a sense, such declines are only natural for risky assets in a credit storm. Instead, what is really alarming is that the assets which were supposed to be ultra-safe – namely AAA and AA rated tranches of debt – have collapsed in value by 20 per cent and 50 per cent odd respectively. This is dangerous, given that financial institutions of all stripes have been merrily leveraging up AAA and AA paper in recent years, precisely because it was supposed to be ultra-safe and thus, er, never lose value.” (Financial Times; Gillian Tett)

AAA and AA assets—the top-graded tranches— have already been downgraded by 20 per cent to 50 per cent! And the prices are bound to fall even more because there is no market for mortgage-backed securities. This is a bank’s worst nightmare; an asset that loses value and requires greater capital reserves every day. In fact, AAA rated MBSs have dropped 14 per cent in one month. It is truly, death by a thousand cuts.

The US financial system is now buckling beneath the weight of its own excesses. The subprime contagion—which can trace its origins to the expansion of credit at the Federal Reserve — has devastated the housing market generating an unprecedented number of foreclosures, record inventory, and a multi-trillion dollar equity bubble which is now deflating and wiping out much of the mortgage industry in its path. Its effects on the secondary market have been even more devastating where pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds and foreign banks are left holding hundreds of billions of dollars of complex, mortgage-backed securities and subprime-related derivatives which are now destined to be downgraded to pennies on the dollar ravaging once-robust portfolios. The subprime meltdown has been equally damaging to myriad European investment banks and brokerage houses. We’ve seen a wave of bank closings in France, Germany and England which has left investors shell-shocked, triggering capital flight from American markets and supplanting confidence in the US financial system with growing suspicion and rage. Where are the regulators?

According to Bloomberg News, “European and Asian investors will avoid most US mortgage-backed securities for years without guarantees from government-linked entities creating an enormous drag on the US housing market”. Foreign investors believe they were hoodwinked by bonds that were deliberately mis-rated to maximize profits for the investment banks. This may explain why $882 billion has been diverted into Chinese and Indian stock markets in the last month alone.

The biggest losers of all, however, are the financial giants that created most of the abstruse, debt-instruments that are now devouring the system from within. The productive and “wealth creating” components of the economy have been subordinated to a finance-driven model which suddenly derailed due to the abusive expansion of debt. Inevitably, some of the banks that took the greatest risks will be shuttered and trillions of dollars in market capitalization will disappear.

Is it possible that anyone with a pulse and a minimal ability to reason couldn’t see the inherent problems of building a financial edifice on the prospect that millions of first-time homeowners with bad credit history and no collateral would pay off there mortgages in a timely and responsible manner?

No. It is not possible. The real reason that the subprime swindle mushroomed into an economy-busting monster is that the markets are no longer policed by any agency that believes in intervention. The pervasive “free market” ideology rejects the notion of supervision or oversight, and as a result, the markets have become increasingly opaque and unresponsive to rules that may assure their continued credibility or even their ability to function properly.

The “supply side” avatars of deregulation have transformed the world’s most vital and prosperous markets into a huckster’s shell-game. All regulatory accountability has vanished along with trillions of dollars in foreign investment. What’s left is a flea-market for dodgy loans, dubious over-leveraged equities and “securitized” Triple A-rated garbage.

Let’s hear it for the Reagan Revolution.

What is striking is how the new “structured finance” paradigm replicates a political system which is no longer guided by principle or integrity. It is not coincidental that the same flag that flies over Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib flutters over Wall Street as well. Nor is it accidental that the same system that peddles bogus, subprime tripe to gullible investors also elevates a “waterboarding advocate” to the highest position in the Justice Department. Both phenomena emerge from the same fetid swamp.

On the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee vote on the confirmation of Judge Michael Mukasey to be Attorney General, anti-torture activists put on a fully realistic display of waterboarding at the entrance to the Department of Justice.

Iranian-born actor/activist Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, wearing an orange jumpsuit and hands bound, was dragged to an inclined board by interrogators dressed as “civilian contractors.” When he could not give the names demanded by his interrogators, a towel was placed over his face and gallons of water were poured over his head.

Dozens of reporters and cameramen pushed forward to capture the scene. Emerging from the experience coughing and shaken, Ebrahimzadeh told reporters that it was the most terrifying experience of his life, even though a piece of plastic behind the towel protected him from the full force of the water.

Introducing the demonstration, C. Clark Kissinger pointed out that media who describe waterboarding as “simulated drowning” are themselves practicing “simulated journalism.” He pointed out that waterboarding is universally understood to be torture, and the United States had even prosecuted as war criminals Japanese officers who had waterboarded U.S. prisoners of war.