Friday, July 09, 2004
Mr Sharon, tear that wall down
The International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled Friday that Israel's security fence being constructed on occupied West Bank land is illegal, violates the human rights of Palestinians and must be dismantled.
The wall "cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order," said Judge Shi Jiuyong of China, who announced the non-binding ruling. "The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law."
The court is also expected to order that Palestinians whose land had been confiscated for the building of the barrier should be compensated, and it will call on countries not to give aid or support to Israel in building the fence.
The ruling was 14 to 1, with the court's only American judge, Thomas Buergenthal, siding with Israel. The ruling, which was requested by the U.N. General Assembly, is called an "advisory opinion" and is non-binding.
More.
posted by chris at 4:24 PM
It was the CIA's fault
The Central Intelligence Agency greatly overestimated the danger presented by deadly unconventional weapons in Iraq because of runaway assumptions that were never sufficiently challenged, the Senate Intelligence Committee said today.
In a long-awaited report that goes to the heart of President Bush's rationale for going to war and is certain to intensify political debate on Iraq, the committee said that prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and his desire to have nuclear weapons, were wildly off the mark.
Okay, but that's only part one. There's more to come.
U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., says the Senate Intelligence Committee will concentrate on the administration of President George W. Bush for the second half of its report on pre-war intelligence.
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"I think it's also clear that they were shaping intelligence in order to meet the policy needs of the administration. There can't be much doubt about that," said Levin.
Levin said the report paints only half the picture, focusing critically on the CIA for its assessment that wrongly claimed Iraq was hiding illegal weapons. He added that the report doesn't examine what he called the administration's exaggerations about the intelligence they received.
posted by chris at 4:20 PM
Happy little accidents
Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.
It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.
The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.
Well, isn't that just damn convenient. And even stranger still is this:
The loss was announced by the Defense Department's Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review in letters to The New York Times and other news organizations that for nearly half a year have sought Mr. Bush's complete service file under the open-records law.
There was no mention of the loss, for example, when White House officials released hundreds of pages of the President's military records last February in an effort to stem Democratic accusations that he was "AWOL" for a time during his commitment to fly at home in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.
(Tip of the hat to Kos.)
posted by chris at 3:51 PM
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Thursday, July 08, 2004
July surprise?
This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan....
This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November....
What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Remember this if/when they finally do capture Bin Laden - it has less to do with protecting the country and everything to do with getting Bush reelected. (via Talking Points Memo.)
posted by chris at 1:42 PM
It's about to get worse
This doesn't loook good. The following was translated from the original German by a Buzzflash reader:
According to information from the International Red Cross, more than a 100 children are imprisoned in Iraq, including in the infamous prison Abu Ghraib.
The German TV magazine "Report" revealed that there has been abuse of children and youth by the coalition forces.
Mainz - "Between January and May of this year we've registered 107 children, during 19 visits in 6 different detention locations" the representative of the International Red Cross, Florian Westphal, told the TV station SWR's Magazine "Report Mainz". He noted that these were places of detention controlled by coalition troops. According to Westphal the number of children held captive could be even higher.
The TV Magazine also reported of evidence and eye witness reports according to which U.S. soldiers also abused children and youthful detainees. Samuel Provance, a staff sergeant stationed in the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison said that interrogating officers had pressured a 15 or 16 year old girl. Military police had only intervened when the girl was already half undressed. On another occasion, a 16 year old was soaked with water, driven through the cold, and then smeared with mud.
Thanks to the indefatigable Bob Harris.
posted by chris at 1:35 PM
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Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Dick, you're wrong
After the 9/11 Commission said there was no evidence of an Iraq/Al-Queda connection, Vice President Cheney still insisted that there was. So the 9/11 Commission went back over their notes.
The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said yesterday that it has had access to the same information on alleged ties between al Qaeda and Iraq as Vice President Cheney, who suggested last month that the panel may not have been privy to all available intelligence when it found limited links between the two.
The one-sentence statement, issued by Chairman Thomas H. Kean (R) and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D), continues the debate over the findings on Iraq by the Sept. 11 commission, which issued a report last month concluding that Iraq and al Qaeda had limited contacts but had not developed a "collaborative relationship."
Mr. Cheney, your move.
posted by chris at 11:44 AM
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Now why would Iraqis be mad at us?
Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency.
Since last August, coalition forces have detained 17,700 people in Iraq who were considered to be enemy fighters or security risks, and about 400 were foreign nationals, according to figures supplied last week by the U.S. military command handling detention operations in Iraq. Most of those detainees were freed after a review board found they didn't pose significant threats. About 5,700 remain in custody, 90 of them non-Iraqis.
The numbers represent one of the most precise measurements to date of the composition of the insurgency and suggest that some Bush administration officials have overstated the role of foreign holy warriors, or jihadists, from other Arab states. The figures also suggest that Iraq isn't as big a magnet for foreign terrorists as some administration critics have asserted.
More.
posted by chris at 3:58 PM
US officials censor Saddam trial
U.S. news networks agreed to let the American military censor out certain images of Saddam Hussein's court hearing Thursday in Baghdad, one in a bizarre series of events surrounding coverage of the session.
American and Iraqi officials did not want any footage shown of Iraqi guards or court personnel, and they asked broadcast and cable news nets to honor this request.
But the situation took an unexpected turn even before the hearing began, when U.S. officials ordered CNN and Al-Jazeera, the pool camera crews, to disconnect their audio equipment. Officials said it was the wish of the Iraqi judge.
Following the hearing, the CNN footage was taken to the convention center, where a CBS News employee transmitted the footage after it was viewed and okayed by two military censors.
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It's also possible that some of the footage was supplied by Dept. of Defense cameras, which were allowed to record sound. Throughout the day, several news nets said it wasn't always clear which footage was from what source, and that it could have been DOD footage, meaning the Pentagon was directly controlling what was being heard.
Story.
posted by chris at 3:53 PM
Oh yeah, forgot to tell you about that . . .
The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The existence of a secret prewar C.I.A. operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists — and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers — has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the C.I.A. and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons.
C.I.A. officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation. The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs, and that analysts at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.
Among the many problems that contributed to the committee's harsh assessment of the C.I.A.'s prewar performance were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials. The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said he did not know of any such program.
That's not to say that an Administration dead set on invading Iraq didn't encourage this kind of information molding.
posted by chris at 10:28 AM
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