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Justice Dept. OKs harsh interrogation tactics
2008-04-27, New York Times
Posted: 2008-05-01 11:49:03
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/washington/27intel.html?ex=1366948800&en=68...

The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still-secret rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. It shows that the administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order issued last summer that President Bush said meant that the C.I.A. would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees. While the Geneva Conventions prohibit “outrages upon personal dignity,” a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard, and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgments. The new documents provide more details about how the administration intends to determine whether a specific technique would be legal, depending on the circumstances involved. Some legal experts critical of the Justice Department interpretation said the department seemed to be arguing that the prospect of thwarting a terror attack could be used to justify interrogation methods that would otherwise be illegal. “What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense,” said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University. The humiliating and degrading treatment of prisoners is prohibited by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Note: For many disturbing reports of increasing threats to civil liberties, click here.

Iraqis see red as U.S. opens world's biggest embassy
2008-04-24, Christian Science Monitor
Posted: 2008-05-01 11:39:19
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0424/p01s04-wome.html

For the average American who will never see it, the new US Embassy in Baghdad may be little more than the Big Dig of the Tigris. Like the infamous Boston highway project, the embassy is a mammoth development that is overbudget, overdue, and casts a whiff of corruption. For many Iraqis, though, the sand-and-ochre-colored compound peering out across the city from a reedy stretch of riverfront within the fortified Green Zone is an unsettling symbol. "It is a symbol of occupation for the Iraqi people, that is all," says Anouar, a Baghdad graduate student who thought it was risk enough to give her first name. "We see the size of this embassy and we think we will be part of the American plan for our country and our region for many, many years." The 104-acre, 21-building enclave – the largest US Embassy in the world, similar in size to Vatican City in Rome – is often described as a "castle" by Iraqis. "We all know this big yellow castle, but its main purpose, it seems, is the security of the Americans who will live there," says Sarah, a university sophomore who also declined to give her last name for reasons of personal safety. The US government cleared the new Baghdad Embassy for occupancy last week, with the embassy's 700 employees and up to 250 military personnel expected to move in over the month of May, according to Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Embassy personnel have been anxious for the complex, with more than 600 blast-resistant apartments, to open and give them some refuge from the mortar fire that has increasingly targeted the Green Zone this year. Last month, a mortar slammed into one of the unfortified trailers where personnel now sleep, killing an American civilian contractor.

Note: For many reports of the reality of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, click here.

VA stalling on care, judge told at S.F. trial
2008-04-21, San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: 2008-04-27 07:44:56
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22/MNQK109AA7.DTL

More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge. The rights of hundreds of thousands of veterans are being violated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, "an agency that is in denial," and by a government health care system and appeals process for patients that is "broken down," Gordon Erspamer, lawyer for two advocacy groups, said in an opening statement at the trial of a nationwide lawsuit. He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency's backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003. U.S. District Judge Samuel Conti ... ruled in January that the case could go to trial. In doing so, he rejected the government's argument that civil courts have no authority over the VA's medical decisions or how it handles grievances. If the advocates can prove their claims, Conti said in his ruling, they would show that "thousands of veterans, if not more, are suffering grievous injuries as the result of their inability to procure desperately needed and obviously deserved health care." He also ruled that veterans are legally entitled to five years of government-provided health care after leaving the service, despite federal officials' argument that they are required to provide only as much care as the VA's budget allows in a given year. The trial follows publication of a Rand study last week that estimated 300,000 U.S. troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, or 18.5 percent of the total, suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress.

Note: For many reports from reliable, verifiable sources detailing the devastating impacts of modern war, click here. For a revealing commentary by a top U.S. general on how soldiers lives are ruined by needless wars, click here.

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
2008-04-20, New York Times
Posted: 2008-04-27 07:42:58
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?ex=1366344000&en...

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure. The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo. To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.

Note: This excellent article should be read in its entirety. For a related video presentation, click here. For an analysis, click here.

Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
2008-04-09, ABC News
Posted: 2008-04-27 07:38:53
http://www.abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4583256

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on [captives] who proved difficult to break, sources said. The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic. The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy. At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies. According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them. The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the [infamous] 2002 memo.

Cheney, Rice Approved Use of Waterboarding, Other Tactics
2008-04-11, FOX News/Associated Press
Posted: 2008-04-17 08:08:07
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,349948,00.html

Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against [captives] after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned. The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, ... were discussed and ultimately approved. A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings ... spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue. Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture. "If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intelligence official said. The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The American Civil Liberties Union called on Congress to investigate. "With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House," ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said. "This is what we suspected all along." The former intelligence official described Cheney and the top national security officials as deeply immersed in developing the CIA's interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when."

Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail
2008-04-06, Washington Post
Posted: 2008-04-17 08:05:23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/05/AR20080405020...

Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out? Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting? These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies." But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief. In the sober language of footnotes, case citations and judicial rulings, the memo explores a wide range of unsavory topics, from the use of mind-altering drugs on captives to the legality of forcing prisoners to squat on their toes in a "frog crouch." It repeats an assertion in another controversial Yoo memo that an interrogation tactic cannot be considered torture unless it would result in "death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions." Yoo, who is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, also uses footnotes to effectively dismiss the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, arguing that protections against unreasonable search and seizure and guarantees of due process either do not apply or are irrelevant in a time of war. He frequently cites his previous legal opinions to bolster his case.

Economists Debate Link Between War, Credit Crisis
2008-04-15, Washington Post
Posted: 2008-04-17 08:02:52
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/14/AR20080414026...

For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the connection between the Iraq conflict and the U.S. economic downturn is simple: "The president has taken us into a failed war," [she] said recently. "He's taken us deeply into debt, and that debt is taking us into recession." Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who wrote the new book The Three Trillion Dollar War, contends that the connection is real. Even with a growing energy demand from China, the United States and elsewhere, oil traders anticipated before the war that the price of oil would remain about $25 a barrel. Instead, it has soared to more than $100 a barrel. Iraqi oil production has not risen with demand, in part because investment in the Middle East has been stunted by war-related unrest. Those price increases are self-perpetuating, Stiglitz argues. Oil-rich Persian Gulf states are so awash in money that they are not sure what to do with it all. That cash, through state-owned sovereign wealth funds, has flowed into stocks, bonds and other investments, creating incentives for lenders to offer low-interest loans, many of which have now gone sour. But that is only one factor, by Stiglitz's accounting. The federal government has sunk deeply into debt, first with tax cuts, then with accelerating war expenditures that have easily topped half a trillion dollars. So the Federal Reserve Board used low interest rates and the free flow of money to keep the economy growing. Cheap credit sparked rash loans, a housing bubble and the current crisis. "The war played a very important role," Stiglitz said. The analysis is politically powerful because people believe it. A CNN poll last month found that 71 percent of Americans say government spending in Iraq is a factor in the economic downturn.

Note: For a powerful personal account of the economic underpinnings of modern war by a US Marine Corps general, click here.

Torture Memo Gave White House Broad Powers
2008-04-02, ABC News
Posted: 2008-04-10 11:21:35
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/DOJ/story?id=4569746&page=1

The Justice Department's newly declassified torture memo outlined the broad legal authority its lawyers gave to the Bush White House on matters of torture and presidential authority during times of war. The March 14, 2003 memorandum ... provided legal "guidance" for military interrogations of "alien unlawful combatants," and concluded that the president's authority during wartime took precedence over the individual rights of enemies captured in the field. The memo ... determined that amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which in part protect rights of individuals charged with crimes, do not apply equally to enemy combatants. "The Fifth Amendment due process clause does not apply to the president's conduct of a war," the memo noted. It also asserted, "The detention of enemy combatants can in no sense be deemed 'punishment' for purposes of the Eighth Amendment," which prohibits "cruel and unusual" forms of punishment. The memo was drafted by John Yoo, who was at the time the deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Former aides to John Ashcroft say the then-attorney general privately dubbed Yoo "Dr. Yes" for being so closely aligned with lawyers at the White House. The memo also provided an argument in defense of government interrogators who used harsh tactics in their line of work. The memo also laid out a defense against the authority of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, or CAT. Jack Goldsmith who headed OLC from October 2003 to July 2004, and worked at the Pentagon before coming to the department ... described the problems he had reviewing and standing by Yoo's work. "My first [reaction] was disbelief that programs of this importance could be supported by legal opinions that were this flawed."

Note: For further disturbing reports on threats to civil liberties, click here.

Inside the Black Budget
2008-04-01, New York Times
Posted: 2008-04-03 12:35:31
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/science/01patc.html?ex=1364702400&en=f406ed...

Skulls. Black cats. A naked woman riding a killer whale. Snakes. Swords. Occult symbols. A wizard with a staff that shoots lightning bolts. A dragon holding the Earth in its claws. No, this is not the fantasy world of a 12-year-old boy. It is ... part of the hidden reality behind the Pentagon’s classified, or “black,” budget that delivers billions of dollars to stealthy armies of high-tech warriors. [A new] book offers a glimpse of this dark world through a revealing lens — patches — the kind worn on military uniforms. Trevor Paglen, an artist and photographer finishing his Ph.D. in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, has managed to document some of this hidden world. The 75 patches he has assembled reveal a bizarre mix of high and low culture. “Oderint Dum Metuant,” reads a patch for an Air Force program that mines spy satellite images for battlefield intelligence, according to Mr. Paglen, who identifies the saying as from Caligula, the first-century Roman emperor famed for his depravity. It translates “Let them hate so long as they fear.” Wizards appear on several patches. The one hurling lightning bolts comes from a secret Air Force base at Groom Lake, northwest of Las Vegas in a secluded valley. Mr. Paglen identifies its five clustered stars and one separate star as a veiled reference to Area 51, where the government tests advanced aircraft and, U.F.O. buffs say, captured alien spaceships. What sparked his interest, Mr. Paglen recalled, were Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks as the Pentagon and World Trade Center smoldered. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows,” Mr. Cheney said. “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Note: The webpage at the link above includes color photos of several of these revealing patches. To read reviews or purchase the book by Trevor Paglen, I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me, click here.

Fight Violence with Nonviolence
2008-03-27, Christian Science Monitor
Posted: 2008-04-03 11:58:25
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0327/p09s01-coop.html

Over the past 25 years nonviolent peacekeepers have been going into zones of sometimes intense conflict with the aim of bringing a measure of peace, protection, and sanity to life there. Rather than use threat or force, unarmed peacekeepers deploy strategies of protective accompaniment, moral and/or witnessing "presence," monitoring election campaigns, creating neutral safe spaces, and in extreme cases putting themselves physically between hostile parties. Civilian unarmed peacekeeping has had dramatic, small-scale, quiet, and unglamorous successes: rescuing child soldiers, protecting the lives of key human rights workers and of whole villages, averting potentially explosive violence, and generally raising the level of security felt by citizens in many a tense community. Recently a village on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines was under threat by two armed groups who had come within 200 meters of each other. The village elders called for help from the Nonviolent Peaceforce stationed there, who intervened and by communicating with all sides persuaded the armed group to back away. Thanks to mediation, no violence erupted, no lives were lost. Why haven't you heard about this exciting work? Because it is terribly underfunded, for one thing. There is also a prevailing prejudice that only governments or armed forces – including those of the United Nations – have the responsibility or means to contain conflict. But the biggest obstacle by far is the widespread – and rarely examined – belief that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. It is the belief that there is only one kind of power; threat power, which in the end can be relied upon to get others to change their minds or, failing that, at least their actions. That may change. The new global norm of "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) should inspire the use of civil society and nonviolent means.

Veterans recall horrors of war in live broadcast
2008-03-16, Boston Globe
Posted: 2008-03-27 11:29:12
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/03/16/veterans_recall_horrors_...

Jeffery Smith recalled how his Army unit beat and humiliated Iraqi prisoners. Former Marine Bryan Casler recounted how fellow Marines urinated and defecated into food and gave it to Iraqi children. Former Marine Matthew Childers talked about how he used to humiliate Iraqi civilians during predawn raids on their homes. When he described turning away an Iraqi father who was asking American troops to help the badly burned baby he carried in his arms, Jackson began to weep silently. "These soldiers are saying: 'I'm complicit,' " said [Liz] Jackson, 29, a community organizer from Cambridge. "But every American citizen who saw this happen and isn't out there protesting is complicit. I include myself." Hundreds of soldiers and Marines from across the country are testifying this weekend in the "Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan" hearings, a four-day event held at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. The event is named after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings in which Vietnam War veterans testified in a Detroit hotel about war crimes they had participated in or witnessed. The hearings, which began Thursday and end today, were organized by the Iraq Veterans Against War, a national antiwar organization, and broadcast live in locations across the country. The veterans who testified called for an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. On Friday, more than a dozen Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from Massachusetts drove to Silver Spring to observe and participate in the hearings. One of them, Ian J. Lavallee, an Iraq war veteran from Jamaica Plain, said in a phone interview, "We dehumanized people. The way we spoke about them, the way we destroyed their livelihoods, their families, doing raids, manhandling them, throwing the men on the ground while their family was crying. I became a person I never thought I would become," he said.

Note: To listen to audio archives of the live Winter Soldier broadcasts, click here. For a powerful essay by a former highly decorated U.S. general on how war is meant to dehumanize both soldiers and civilians, click here.

The War Endures, but Where’s the Media?
2008-03-24, New York Times
Posted: 2008-03-27 11:27:29
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/business/media/24press.html?ex=1364011200&e...

Five years later, the United States remains at war in Iraq, but there are days when it would be hard to tell from a quick look at television news, newspapers and the Internet. Media attention on Iraq began to wane after the first months of fighting, but as recently as the middle of last year, it was still the most-covered topic. Since then, Iraq coverage by major American news sources has plummeted, to about one-fifth of what it was last summer, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. The drop in coverage parallels ... a decline in public interest. Surveys by the Pew Research Center show that more than 50 percent of Americans said they followed events in Iraq “very closely” in the months just before and after the war began, but that slid to an average of 40 percent in 2006, and has been running below 30 percent since last fall. The three broadcast networks’ nightly newscasts devoted more than 4,100 minutes to Iraq in 2003 and 3,000 in 2004, before leveling off at about 2,000 a year, according to Andrew Tyndall, who monitors the broadcasts and posts detailed breakdowns at tyndallreport.com. And by the last months of 2007, he said, the broadcasts were spending half as much time on Iraq as earlier in the year. Since the start of last year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a part of the nonprofit Pew Research Center, has tracked reporting by several dozen major newspapers, cable stations, broadcast television networks, Web sites and radio programs. Iraq accounted for 18 percent of their prominent news coverage in the first nine months of 2007, but only 9 percent in the following three months, and 3 percent so far this year. And reporting on events in Iraq has fallen by more than two-thirds from a year ago.

Note: For a powerful summary of major media censorship, click here.

Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore
2008-03-06, Boston Globe
Posted: 2008-03-11 08:46:13
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2008/03/06/top_iraq_contractor_skir...

Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in [the Cayman Islands]. More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands. The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies. With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor. The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000. The largest of the Cayman Islands shell companies - called Service Employers International Inc., which is now listed as having more than 20,000 workers in Iraq, according to KBR - was created two years before Cheney became Halliburton's chief executive. But a second Cayman Islands company called Overseas Administrative Services, which now is listed as the employer of 1,020 mostly managerial workers in Iraq, was established two months after Cheney's appointment.

Note: To read a powerful personal statement about the reality of war profiteering by a highly decorated Marine Corps general, click here.

Patriot missiles: Iraq Veterans Against the War
2008-03-02, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
Posted: 2008-03-11 08:41:18
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3444835.ece

Some of them will be okay. They will live with the secrets. They can dissociate from what happened in combat because it was part of the job. They will keep the secrets out of duty – the silence is part of a code, and they honour that code above all else. But for others, the secrets they keep are like a poison, slowly releasing toxins of shame and remorse. Who can they tell anyway? They talk to each other – other veterans who have seen what they’ve seen, done what they’ve done, and who can relate to the burden of carrying these secrets for the rest of their lives. In 1971, the protest group Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered at a hotel in Detroit. More than 100 veterans talked about the atrocities they had witnessed in southeast Asia. The event lasted for three days and was named Winter Soldier after Thomas Paine’s famous article. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he wrote of the terrible winter of 1776. This month, for four days in Washington, DC, beginning on March 13, there will be a second Winter Soldier gathering – 37 years after the first. Organised by the protest group Iraq Veterans Against the War, US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan since the 9/11 attack on New York will testify about their experiences. They will present photographs and videos, recorded with mobile phones and digital cameras, to back up their allegations – of brutality, torture and murder. The veterans ... seek to shine a light on the bigger picture: that the Abu Ghraib prison regime and the Haditha massacre of innocent Iraqis are not isolated incidents perpetrated by “bad seeds” as the military suggests, but evidence of an endemic problem. They will say they were tasked to do terrible things and point the finger up the chain of command.

Note: For many revelations of the realities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, click here.

'Doomsday' Vault Opens to Protect Seeds
2008-02-26, Associated Press
Posted: 2008-03-03 11:48:38
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jRw_99fcIqca5u6uzuVRuiogts2gD8V1HNK80

It's been dubbed a Noah's Ark for plant life and built to withstand an earthquake or a nuclear attack. Dug deep into the permafrost of a remote Arctic mountain, the "doomsday" vault is designed by Norway to protect the world's seeds from global catastrophe. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a backup to the world's 1,400 other seed banks, was to be officially inaugurated in a ceremony Tuesday on the northern rim of civilization attended by about 150 guests from 33 countries. The frozen vault has the capacity to store 4.5 million seed samples from around the globe, shielding them from climate change, war, natural disasters and other threats. Norway's government owns the vault in Svalbard, a frigid archipelago 620 miles from the North Pole. The Nordic country paid $9.1 million for construction, which took less than a year. Other countries can deposit seeds for free and reserve the right to withdraw them upon need. Giant air conditioning units have chilled the vault to just below zero, a temperature at which experts say many seeds could survive for 1,000 years. Inside the concrete entrance ... a roughly 400-foot-long tunnel of steel and concrete leads to three separate 32-by-88-foot chambers where the seeds will be stored. The first 600 boxes with 12 tons of seeds already have arrived from 20 seed banks around the world, Norwegian Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen said. Each chamber can hold 1.5 million packets holding all types of crop seeds, from carrots to wheat.

The three trillion dollar war
2008-02-23, The Telegraph (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
Posted: 2008-03-03 11:43:51
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/articl...

The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The president and his advisers [forecast] a quick, inexpensive conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than anyone could have imagined. The cost of direct US military operations - not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans - already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War. And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion. Most Americans have yet to feel these costs. The price in blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hired contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to pay for it - in fact, taxes on the rich have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real even if they have been deferred, possibly to another generation. From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions.

Note: For many reports from major media sources which reveal massive war profiteering, click here.

Army Blocks Public's Access to Documents in Web-Based Library
2008-02-21, Washington Post
Posted: 2008-03-03 11:39:46
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/20/AR20080220028...

The Army has shut down public access to the largest online collection of its doctrinal publications, a move criticized by open-government advocates as unnecessary secrecy by a runaway bureaucracy. Army officials moved the Reimer Digital Library behind a password-protected firewall on Feb. 6, restricting access to an electronic trove that is popular with researchers for its wealth of field and technical manuals and documents on military operations, education, training and technology. All are unclassified, and most already are approved for public release. "Almost everything connected to the Army is reflected in some way in the Reimer collection," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists. "It provides the public with an unparalleled window into Army policy. It provides unclassified resources on military planning and doctrine." Aftergood ... said the collection offers specialized military manuscripts that do not appear on the shelves of local libraries. These include documents on the Army's use of unmanned aircraft [and] tactics and techniques for the use of nonlethal weapons. "All of this stuff had been specifically approved for public release," Aftergood said. "I think it's a case of bureaucracy run amok. And it's a familiar impulse to secrecy that needs to be challenged at every turn." In 2006, the National Archives acknowledged that the CIA and other agencies had withdrawn thousands of records from the public shelves ... and inappropriately reclassified many of them. Early in 2002, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft issued a memo urging federal agencies to use whatever legal means necessary to reject Freedom of Information Act requests for public documents.

Note: For reliable reports on escalating government secrecy from reliable, verifiable sources, click here.

U.S. Payments To Pakistan Face New Scrutiny
2008-02-21, Washington Post
Posted: 2008-03-03 11:37:56
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/02/20/ST2008022002819...

Once a month, Pakistan's Defense Ministry delivers 15 to 20 pages of spreadsheets to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. They list costs for feeding, clothing, billeting and maintaining 80,000 to 100,000 Pakistani troops in the volatile tribal area along the Afghan border. No receipts are attached. In response, the Defense Department has disbursed about $80 million monthly, or roughly $1 billion a year for the past six years, in one of the most generous U.S. military support programs worldwide. But vague accounting, disputed expenses and suspicions about overbilling have recently made these payments to Pakistan highly controversial -- even within the U.S. government. Questions have already been raised about where the money went and what the Bush administration got in return. In perhaps the most disputed series of payments, Pakistan received about $80 million a month in 2006 and 2007 for military operations during cease-fires with pro-Taliban tribal elders along the border, including a 10-month truce in which troops returned to their barracks. U.S. officials say the payments to Pakistan -- which over the past six years have totaled $5.7 billion -- were cheap compared with expenditures on Iraq, where the United States now spends at least $1 billion a week on military operations alone. Congressional officials and others are concerned that the administration has been so eager to prop up Musharraf that it overlooked U.S. foreign aid and accounting standards. A congressional oversight subcommittee is also set to begin an investigation next month, while the Government Accountability Office plans to finish its own inquiry in April.

BAE: secret papers reveal threats from Saudi prince
2008-02-15, The Guardian (One of the U.K.'s leading newspapers)
Posted: 2008-02-25 08:39:41
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/15/bae.armstrade

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday. Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence. Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE. He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family. The threats halted the fraud inquiry. Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government. The SFO investigation began in 2004, when Robert Wardle, its director, studied evidence unearthed by the Guardian. This revealed that massive secret payments were going from BAE to Saudi Arabian princes, to promote arms deals. Yesterday, anti-corruption campaigners began a legal action to overturn the decision to halt the case. They want the original investigation restarted, arguing the government had caved into blackmail.

Note: This report comes very close to confirming the close link between terrorist attacks and high-level policy of certain states. For many revealing clues along these lines from reliable sources, click here.

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