No Questions Asked

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Below is an excellent article on the buildup to a war with Iran.

The Myth of ‘Weapons-Grade’ Enrichment
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi, Asia Times

Talk about the double standards at the United Nations. Whereas UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has repeatedly condemned Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric against Israel, expressing “shock and dismay”, he has remained ominously, and inexcusably, silent about the blatant Israeli threats of military attacks on Iran, thus undermining the world’s confidence in his ability to steer the global community clear of yet another major war in the Middle East caldron.

Having turned a blind eye to Iran’s formal protest at the UN regarding Israel’s explicit threats, Ban may need to revisit his own statement of June 7, 2007, “The secretary general points out that all members have undertaken to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

In light of new media disclosures about Israel’s advanced plans to launch a major air offensive against Iran’s nuclear installations, bound to inflict serious civilian casualties and trigger the volatile region into a “fireball”, to paraphrase the reaction of the head of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammad ElBaradei, who has stated categorically that he would resign immediately if Iran is attacked, Ban is borderline on the verge of skirting his official obligation by refusing to issue a stern statement on this serious matter of war and peace.

ElBaradei’s comments followed confirmation by sources at the Pentagon and other US government agencies that Israel recently carried out a full rehearsal of an air assault on Iran’s nuclear sites.

Should Israel deliver on its stated threats and drop its bombs on Iran, thus triggering a major conflict in the Middle East, with dangerous and unanticipated consequences, then the UN will be widely regarded a key casualty of this crisis, and would be blamed for failing in prudent crisis-management.

Unfortunately, compounding the UN’s shortcoming above-cited is a related failure of mainstream media in the US and Europe to criticize Ban’s flawed approach to the Iran crisis, or to address the systematic disinformation and planned paranoia about Iran’s nuclear program put forth by Israel and its allies.

Instead, the US media in particular have allowed themselves to become an unwitting accomplice of Israel’s anti-Iran propaganda machine, dutifully recycling the line that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons, has amassed “weapons-grade” enriched uranium, and is thus on the verge of arriving at “the point of no return” with respect to bomb-making.

In a word, the race to dupe public opinion about a “clear and present danger” posed by Iran’s nuclear program, to justify Israel’s threatened attack (with the US’s tacit approval) is in full gear and the US media are by and large about to receive another “F” card, just as they did with the US’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the “pluralistic” media became a shell of itself by blindly echoing the White House’s spin about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Indeed, it is remarkable how little the US media have learned, or evolved, since then and how frozen their will is when it comes to their sedimented inability to criticize the state of Israel, recalling the criticisms of US editorials by former president Jimmy Carter in his book, Worse than Apartheid. In fact, the rather uniform, uncritical and conformist behavior of the US media shows that they are worse than Israel’s own media, they occasionally display signs of independence from the government on foreign policy matters.

The Miami Herald has been running a series on Guantanamo Bay. It’s worth reading and it’s good to see a paper dedicated so much space to an investigative piece. The stories were reported and written by Tom Lasseter. They saved the best for last so if you are only going to read one part, make it the third one.

Part 1: Many at Guantánamo had low-level or no terrorism ties

GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

They shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face. American troops dragged Akhtiar out of his home in Gardez, Afghanistan, in May 2003, flew him to Guantánamo in shackles that July and held him there for more than three years. The tribal leader from eastern Afghanistan belonged to an insurgent group and had taken part in rocket attacks on U.S. forces, American officials said. Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects who were imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are, the Bush administration has said, “the worst of the worst.”

Part 2: Detainee abuse routine at U.S. bases in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that’s used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment.

Part 3: Guantanamo has become a terrorism training ground

Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaeda. By the time Farouq was released from the Guantánamo Bay detention camp the following year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he’d made connections to high-level militants.

In fact, he’d become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 ”most wanted” playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — with Osama bin Laden at the top — Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.

A McClatchy Newspapers investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantánamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.

The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.

Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantánamo enraged at the United States.

The Taliban and al Qaeda leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantánamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.

Of course the press was a war “enabler”. As I describe in the book, journalists were more than enablers — they were propagandists for the cause. Katie Couric was one of the worst offenders (see chapter 4).

In his new memoir, “What Happened,” Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, said the national news media neglected their watchdog role in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, calling reporters “complicit enablers” of the Bush administration’s push for war.

Surprisingly, some prominent journalists have agreed.

Katie Couric, the anchor of “CBS Evening News,” said on Wednesday that she had felt pressure from government officials and corporate executives to cast the war in a positive light.

Speaking on “The Early Show” on CBS, Ms. Couric said the lack of skepticism shown by journalists about the Bush administration’s case for war amounted to “one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.” She also said she sensed pressure from “the corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of it.” At the time, Ms. Couric was a host of “Today” on NBC.

Another broadcast journalist also weighed in. Jessica Yellin, who worked for MSNBC in 2003 and now reports for CNN, said on Wednesday that journalists had been “under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation.”

On Thursday, she clarified her comments in a blog post, writing that her producers at MSNBC had wanted their coverage to reflect the patriotic mood of the country.

A spokeswoman for General Electric, which owns NBC and MSNBC through its division NBC Universal, declined to speak about the specifics of the comments but said, “General Electric has never, and will never, interfere in the editorial process at NBC News.”

The opinions of Ms. Couric and Ms. Yellin were hardly universal among journalists. Ms. Couric made her comments in an unusual on-camera tour of network morning programs — along with her two evening news competitors, Brian Williams of “NBC Nightly News” and Charles Gibson of “World News” on ABC — to promote a cancer research telethon.

“I think the questions were asked,” Mr. Gibson, who was a host of “Good Morning America” before the war began, said in response to Ms. Couric. “It was just a drumbeat of support from the administration. It is not our job to debate them. It is our job to ask the questions.”

Mr. Williams, who was an anchor on MSNBC at the time, emphasized the climate of “post-9/11 America.” In the early days of the war, he said, he would hear from the Pentagon “the minute they heard us report something they didn’t like.”

For five years, antiwar activists and media critics have claimed that the national news media failed to keep the White House accountable before the invasion. Andrew Heyward, who headed CBS News in 2003, said in an interview on Thursday that the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing sense of patriotism might have muted press skepticism about the war.

Greg Mitchell, the author of “So Wrong for So Long,” a book about press and presidential failures on the war, argues that some media organizations have yet to come to terms with their role. Even at the fifth anniversary of the war last March, he said, “in the orgy of coverage of what had happened, there was almost no media self-assessment.”

NBC and CBS would not make executives available for interviews on the subject. Jon Banner, the executive producer of “World News” on ABC, said the news media should not be treated as a monolith.

“Were there questions we would have liked to ask?” Mr. Banner said. “Sure, but we were very critical of the administration and paid a significant price for it. It’s absurd and incorrect to lump us all together.”

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit — meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon — eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

… “He’s just really scared,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview last Thursday. “He asked me if Virginia has the death penalty.”

Mr. Salerno’s case may be extreme, but it underscores the real but little-known dangers that many travelers from Europe and other first-world nations face when they arrive in the United States — problems that can startle Americans as much as their foreign visitors.

“We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians,” said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper’s father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. “They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn’t happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans.”

Each year, thousands of would-be visitors from 27 so-called visa waiver countries are turned away when they present their passports, said Angelica De Cima, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, who said she could not discuss any individual case. In the last seven months, 3,300 people have been rejected and more than 8 million admitted, she said.

What happened to those who were rejected and were not helped by well-connected Americans? Are they languishing in jails throughout the country?

So, we paid “the coalition of the willing” at least $135 million to enter the illegal war in Iraq (much more than we pledged to give the victims of natural disasters in China and Myanmar combined). We gave an Iraqi officer $320 million without knowing exactly what he was going to do with the money. In all, we improperly spent 7.8 billion, according to an official in the Pentagon. Meanwhile, back in the US, victims of hurricane Katrina are still struggling to get back into permanent homes and thousands of “middle class” people face foreclosure every day.

Someone at a very high level needs to pay for these crimes. And we need to know how Obama, Clinton or McCain will correct these problems.

The tale of massive fraud and embezzlement of millions of dollars by the US military in its operations in Iraq continues. Testifying before the US Congress Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on 22 May, Mary Ugone, deputy inspector general of accounts in the Pentagon said that an audit of $8.2 billion spending related to the Iraq war showed that $7.8 billion had been improperly spent.

Auditors found that the Pentagon gave away $1.8 billion from seized Iraqi assets. There were 53 vouchers noting these payments but not even one adequately explained where the money went.