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TRADE RESOURCE CENTER
CURRENT UPDATES: June 7, 2007 Guantánamo, The Arms Trade, Cluster Bombs and More Today we wish Bill Hartung, director of the Arms Trade Resource Center and World Policy Institute Senior Fellow, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! On this day in 1893, Gandhi tries nonviolent civil disobedience for the first time—refusing to conform to the racial segregation rules on a South African train. Ejected from the train, the young lawyer decided to commit his life to fighting injustice. A few years later on this same day (okay 79 years later, in 1972) George McGovern—the Democratic Senator from South Dakota and a Presidential hopeful-- announced that he would go "anywhere in the world" to negotiate an end to the Vietnam war and a return of U.S. troops and POWs. Bill Hartung also shares a birthday with Dean Martin (although Bill is quite a bit younger than the classic comedian). Can you tell who has been visiting the History Channel? In this issue of the Arms Trade Resource Center…. TABLE OF CONTENTS: I. BLOW TO GUANTÁNAMO Is Justice on the Horizon? Colonel Peter Brownback III, a military judge, dealt a serious blow to Guantánamo—and by extension, the “global war on terrorism legal system” -- this week, ruling that because the military had failed to classify two men as “unlawful” enemy combatants, as required by the Military Commissions Act passed last year by Congress, he did not have jurisdiction over their cases. The procedural flaws that Colonel Brownback discovered point to much larger defects in the Bush administrations’ whole legal architecture. Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan are the only two detainees at Guantánamo (out of about 380 men currently detained) who were facing trial by the military tribunal when Brownback ruled in the cases. Administration officials must now appeal the decision and seek to reclassify the two men in order to reopen the case. “This is just a semantic decision, is the way we are viewing it,” an unnamed official told the New York Times. While they are doing that, a spotlight is on “justice” at Guantánamo. Marine Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the lead military defense lawyer from prisoners there, told the Times that the decision has broad impact; “How much more evidence do we need that the military commission process doesn’t work?” Counter-terrorism law expert Michael Greenberg, who teaches at University of Maryland, notes, Brownback’s rulings are a “tug on the yarn of a sweater that’s going to unravel completely.” Omar Khadr is one of the few imprisoned at Guantánamo who was clearly captured on the battlefield. During a July 2002 battle near Khost in Afghanistan, Khadr reportedly threw a grenade killing Green Beret sergeant, Christopher Speer and wounding Sergeant Layne Morris. Khadr-- a Canadian citizen-- was 15 when he was transferred to Guantánamo. Although he is thought to be the youngest detainee at the U.S. detention camp, he is not the only one. Salim Ahmed Hamdan is Yemeni. He admitted to being a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, but that confession could have been extracted through torture and coercion. He took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which declared that the military commissions under which he was to be tried unlawful. The Bush administration then created—and Congress approved—the Military Commissions Act. Editorial columns throughout the country are renewing and strengthening calls for the shuttering of Guantánamo prison. The House of Representatives has passed a measure directing the Secretary of Defense to draw up a plan to clear out the prison. Secretary if Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush have all said--at different times, varying volumes and fluctuating intensity-- that Guantánamo should be shut down. But, some within the administration stand fast in the face of widespread condemnation of torture and indefinite detention. John Bellinger, a legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, defends continuing to hold Omar Khadr—even if he were found not guilty: “as a matter of law, we believe we may continue to hold someone even after they are acquitted…. Because they are combatants and they would return to acts of combat and we think… we can hold them until the end of that conflict.” That position was echoed by Daniel Dell'Orto, a top Pentagon lawyer, who recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Detention of enemy combatants in wartime is not criminal punishment and therefore does not require that the individual be charged or tried in a court of law.” Detention is not punishment? Tell that to men who have lost five years of their life in a cage and are subjected to torture—which the administration calls “enhanced interrogation techniques.” A brief aside: Andrew Sullivan, a conservative blogger, recently drew a straight line between these tactics and "Verschärfte Vernehmung" which is translated into "enhanced interrogation," "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation.” Writing for The Atlantic blog, Sullivan continues by noting that the term (and practice) was “concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court.” His entry includes a memo from the Gestapo and a very graphic image of a victim of “enhanced interrogation.” (link is provided at the end of this post). And, what is wartime? When does it end? In 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney warned that the war would last a lifetime. The administration used to call it “the long war.” We have been told it is a generational struggled akin to the Cold War. What does it mean to hold men without trial for the duration of the war? It means a life sentence for many never charged or tried. It means a death sentence for a growing number of men. On June 10, 2006, three men hanged themselves at Guantánamo—one Yasser Talal Al Zahrani was 17 when he was detained. Nearly a year later, on May 30th, Abdul Rahman Ma-ath Thafir Al-Amri died in what U.S. military officials are characterizing as a suicide. Although characterized by the Pentagon as a jihadist, Al-Amri served in the Saudi army for nine years, where he received training from the U.S. military. Not much is known about the charged leveled against him, but he has regularly starved himself to protest his detention and treatment. At one point, he weighed less than 90 pounds. Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for a number of prisoners at Guantánamo, “we can guarantee there will be more deaths” if the prison remains open. Amnesty International estimates that 200 men at Guantánamo have staged hunger strikes since the camp opened and 40 have attempted suicide (some repeatedly). During the June 3rd debate, Senator John Edwards was the only “top tier” Democratic candidate to criticize Guantánamo, joining Arizona Governor Bill Richardson in a pointed critique. Richardson: “We should shut down -- I would, first day as president, I would shut down Guantánamo. I would shut down Abu Ghraib and…. and secret prisons.” For his part, Edwards listed some of the Bush administration’s actions that have degraded U.S. security, including “the ongoing war in Iraq, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, spying on Americans, torture” and concluded: “none of these things are okay. They are not the United States of America.” Maybe the others agree with Republican candidate Mitt Romney, who condoned “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the May 15th GOP debate in South Carolina. Romney wants to see facilities at Guantánamo doubled and applauded the fact that prisoners “have no access to lawyers they get here.” The Columbia, South Carolina debate took place just three and half hours from the rural airstrip in North Carolina where CIA rendition flights take off. Mitt and the others need to listen to people like Rear Admiral John Hutson (ret.), who told an April 24th Senate panel that “the way we have dealt with detainees risks blemishing the reputation of this great country for generations to come.” And he is not just talking about a few little topical spots. Retired Generals Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar elaborate on the kind of blemishes the U.S. is in danger of receiving. In a recent Washington Post op-ed, they warn that “torture methods… have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy… if we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy.” Joseph Margulies, a professor at Northwestern Law School, wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that Guantánamo “breeds terror,” and is a “fetid and cancerous symbol of hubris and hegemony.” The chorus of voices against Guantánamo mounts across the political spectrum. A December 2006 Intelligence Science Board report on interrogation techniques entitled “Educing Information” was recently made public. The report cites the absences of development of new information gleaning techniques in the post-Cold War period and asserts that “this shortfall in advanced, research-based interrogation methods at a time of intense pressure from operational commanders to produce actionable intelligence from high-value targets may have contributed significantly to the unfortunate cases of abuse that have recently come to light.” They add that many interrogators “were forced to ‘make it up’ on the fly.” Links: Verschärfte Vernehmung “It’s Our Cage Too: Torture Betrays Us and Breeds New Enemies” “Guantánamo’s Final Notice” Educing Information: Interrogation
II.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCEED... Haven’t we established the arms and military aid do not equal stability and security for the nations of the world? Despite a world at war full of object lessons, the Pentagon is seeking more money and less oversight in an expanded security and military aid for "coalition partners" in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some of the countries listed are: Algeria, Chad, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Lebanon, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Yemen and Sao Tome Principe. The so-called “Building Global Partnerships Act” of 2007 would give Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (in consultation with the Secretary of State) the authority to allocate up to $750 million dollars in foreign military aid to "combat terrorism and enhance stability.” In the past, the Pentagon had to comply with the Foreign Assistance Act in providing military aid to other nations—the act imposes strict compliance with human rights standards. The new bill asserts that “flexibility” for U.S. military commanders is “critical to United States national security” and seeks to “eliminate Foreign Assistance Act restrictions.” "If you're giving aid to undesirable countries, by human rights standards, it usually backfires on you," Ivan Eland, a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute, told the Inter Press Service, "It may provide short term benefits in the 'war on terror', but the long-term consequences may be unclear." The White House has submitted the “Building Global Partnerships Act” to the House of Representatives and Senate but it has not been reviewed in committee or sent to the floor of either chamber for a vote. Many in the non-governmental community oppose the Act. More than thirty signed on to a letter to Congress asserting that “the Building Global Partnerships Act of 2007 represents a continuation of the dangerous trend to remove State Department control over U.S. military assistance programs.” A link to their letter to Congress is provided below:
III. BAN CLUSTER BOMBS CAMPAIGN GROWS At the end of May Lima, Peru hosted an international meeting to continue work on a treaty to ban cluster munitions. The Lima Conference on Cluster Munitions demonstrated the strong and widespread support for a new treaty. Twenty-eight new countries joined the 46 states that launched a new process in Oslo in February this year to conclude a treaty by 2008. The nations commit themselves to a new international instrument banning all cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians by 2008. It is estimated that Laos is the nation most saturated with cluster bomb duds, has tens of millions of unexploded bomblets left after the U.S. bombings more than 30 years ago. While Laos was not represented at the February meeting in Oslo, they came to the Lima meeting, where their long disastrous experience with cluster weapons lent urgency and seriousness to the work to ban these weapons that keep killing long after wars are over. Cluster munitions are weapons that can disperse up to several hundreds of smaller submunitions - sometimes referred to as "bomblets" - over wide areas. They have indiscriminate wide area effects that kill and injure civilians during attacks and they leave severe and lasting humanitarian and development consequences from large quantities of post-conflict unexploded ordnance. At least 75 countries around the world stockpile cluster munitions and 34 are known to have produced more than 210 types of cluster munitions Cluster munitions have been used in at least 25 countries. The United States, one of the largest manufacturer and exporter of cluster munitions and delivery systems, was not represented at the meeting. States agreed on the need for obligations to provide assistance to victims, clear contaminated land, destroy stockpiles and provide international cooperation and assistance. The new process mirrors that of the successful campaign that banned anti-personnel landmines in 1997. The process is set to continue with international meetings in Vienna, Austria in December, in Wellington, New Zealand in February 2008, and in Dublin, Ireland May 2008. More information on the Cluster Munitions Coalition is available online. The new Handicap International report "Circle of Impact: the Fatal Footprint of Cluster Munitions on People and Communities" is available online.
A. COLLATERAL DAMAGE: The Center for Public Integrity’s New Report CPI has published one of the most comprehensive resources on U.S. military aid and assistance in the post-9/11 era and brings together reporting from 10 of the world's leading investigative journalists with a powerful database combining U.S. military assistance, foreign lobbying expenditures, and human rights abuses into a single, easily accessible toolkit. The report is significant for its detail and its accessibility. Among Collateral Damage’s findings are:
In their investigation, 10 ICIJ reporters on four continents explored what Vice President Cheney has described as "the dark side" of American counterterrorism policy since the 2001 terrorist attacks. They found that post-9/11 U.S. political pressure, Washington lobbying and aid dollars have reshaped policies towards countries ranging from tiny Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, to Pakistan and Thailand in Asia, to Poland and Romania in Europe, even to Colombia in South America. ICIJ reporters also combed through official reports as well as new sources detailing cases of extraordinary renditions and other "dark side" practices and found the United States following the lead of Israel in some controversial post-9/11 tactics. In addition, the Center sifted through thousands of Department of Justice lobbying records and human rights reports and used Freedom of Information Act requests to assemble a comprehensive database to analyze both old and new forms of U.S. military training and assistance to foreign governments and security forces before and after the 9/11 attacks. The report and the database are online, and are both worth a long perusal.
B. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: Human Right 2006 At the end of the May, Amnesty International released its Amnesty International Report 2007, an annual assessment of human rights around the world. The report focused in on fear— "The politics of fear is fuelling a downward spiral of human rights abuse in which no right is sacrosanct and no person safe,” said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, at the report’s launch. “Through short sighted, fear-mongering and divisive policies, governments are undermining the rule of law and human rights, feeding racism and xenophobia, dividing communities, intensifying inequalities and sowing the seeds for more violence and conflict.” Amnesty saved some its most pointed criticism for the United States as the architect of the war on terror and the world’s most powerful nation: “The USA, unrivalled in military and economic terms in the region and the world, continued to maintain a dual discourse on human rights as it pursued its “war on terror”. It claimed to be the leading force for the promotion of human rights and the rule of law, while simultaneously pursuing policies and practices that flouted some of the most basic principles of international law. In so doing, it undermined not only long-term security of which the rule of law is a central pillar, but also its own credibility on the international stage.” The whole report, which chronicles the state of human rights throughout the world, is online.
C. GOOD BYE HOUSTON Corpwatch recently released is 2007 “alternative annual report” for global oil and war “reconstruction” company Halliburton which provides a detailed look at the company’s military and energy operations around the world as well as its political connections. Released on the eve of Halliburton’s annual shareholders meeting, the report includes a series of recommendations for the company and its shareholders as well as for the United States policymakers. "Goodbye Houston" also documents:
Today as the military slows its purchases of Halliburton services in Iraq, the company is diversifying into such profitable areas the provision of direct services to the oil and gas industry abroad.
The full report is online.
D. CONTRACTORS BEHAVING BADLY Unfortunately, Halliburton is not the only bad apple in the barrel. Taxpayers for Common Sense alerts us to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigation that has discovered more than 60,000 contractors with the U.S. federal government that owe more than $7.7 billion in back taxes, including:
As TCS observes, “While these contractors have one hand out to get government cash, they were using the other to stiff arm the tax man.” A few examples highlighted by GAO:
Read more online: Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Government Management, Organization, and Procurement, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House of Representatives. http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07742t.pdf
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