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JFP News 9/28: For Peace, It Matters if the Republicans Take Congress
Submitted by Robert Naiman on 28 September 2010 - 6:55pm
Just Foreign Policy News
September 28, 2010
For Peace Efforts, It Matters if the Republicans Take Congress
The gap between the soaring rhetoric of the Obama Presidential campaign and the reality we live today is plain for all to see. But a rational and moral actor thinks primarily in terms of actions and consequences. If the Republicans retake Congress, promoting reform of U.S. foreign policy is going to be much more difficult.
ABC Video: Soldier Describes Murder of Afghan for Sport in Leaked Tape
ABC reproduces a leaked interrogation video broadcast in which a U.S. soldier describes the alleged "killing of Afghan civilians for sport."
An Israeli documentary about the life and death of American peace activist Rachel Corrie opens in New York at the Anthology Film Archives on October 8.
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1) The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos, Gareth Porter reports for Truthout. The report reveals that Dogan was filming with a video camera when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground. The concluded that Dogan's killing and that of five Turkish citizens "can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions." The report confirmed what the Obama administration already knew from the autopsy report on Dogan, but the administration has remained silent.
2) Israeli navy commandos commandeered a boat sailed by an international group of Jewish activists on Tuesday trying to break Israel's blockade on Gaza, the New York Times reports.
3) Writing in CongressDaily, George C. Wilson notes that according to Bob Woodward's new book, President Obama said, "I'm not spending a trillion dollars" in Afghanistan. But the U.S. is well on its way towards that figure, Wilson notes. So far Congress has appropriated $336 billion, according to a CRS report. And that does not include future costs implied by action already taken, such as veterans' health care. Public Department of Defense statistics understate injuries related to combat, Wilson notes.
4) More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010, ProPublica reports. In the same period, 235 soldiers died.
5) The C.I.A. has drastically increased its bombing campaign in Pakistan in recent weeks, the New York Times reports, suggesting the pace is related to pressure to show results before the December policy review. The C.I.A.'s campaign has raised concerns that the drone strikes are fueling anger in the Muslim world, the Times notes.
6) 377 members of the European Parliament adopted a declaration on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in which they demand greater transparency in negotiations, and say that ACTA should not force limitations on due process or weaken fundamental rights such as freedom of expression, Ars Technica reports. Other critics have noted that the agreement could jeopardize access to essential medicines.
7) Gen. Petraeus told reporters that high-level Taliban leaders had reached out to senior Afghan officials in the context of starting reconciliation discussions that could pave the way to end the fighting in Afghanistan, Alissa Rubin reports in the New York Times. "On its face a peace deal with the Taliban appears to be a necessary ingredient for the withdrawal of international troops," Rubin writes. The talks are continuous, according to people knowledgeable about them, Rubin says.
8) Israel's decision to end its freeze on West Bank Jewish settlement construction sent diplomats scurrying to save the talks, the New York Times reports. Palestinian officials said they found it hard to understand how the Obama administration could express its opposition to the building but not have it stopped.
9) A foreign ministry spokesman said Iran will press to have its "nuclear rights" recognized in talks with world powers, AFP reports. A spokesman said Iran's chief nuclear negotiator was seeking to set "a date and venue" to meet EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton.
10) House Foreign Affairs Chair Berman said he has indefinitely postponed voting on legislation to end a ban on US nationals traveling to Cuba, AFP reports. "I firmly believe that when we debate and vote on the merits of this legislation, and I intend for it to be soon, the right to travel will be restored to all Americans," Berman said. But the decision clouded the fate of congressional efforts to ease measures targeting Cuba, since Democrats, who are more likely to favor doing so, are expected to suffer heavy losses in November 2 elections, AFP notes.
11) Nine retired U.S. military officers are urging that the U.S. travel ban to Cuba be lifted, Laura Rozen reports in Politico. They argue that lifting the ban would enhance U.S. security by removing an unnecessary irritant in U.S.-Cuba relations.
1) UN Fact-Finding Mission Says Israelis "Executed" US Citizen Furkan Dogan
Gareth Porter, Truthout, Monday 27 September 2010
The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.
The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground.
The report says Dogan had apparently been "lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time" before being shot in his face.
The forensic evidence that establishes that fact is "tattooing around the wound in his face," indicating that the shot was "delivered at point blank range." The report describes the forensic evidence as showing that "the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back."
Based on both "forensic and firearm evidence," the fact-finding panel concluded that Dogan's killing and that of five Turkish citizens by the Israeli troops on the Mavi Marmari May 31 "can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions."
The report confirmed what the Obama administration already knew from the autopsy report on Dogan, but the administration has remained silent about the killing of Dogan, which could be an extremely difficult political problem for the administration in its relations with Israel.
The Turkish government gave the autopsy report on Dogan to the US Embassy in July and it was then passed on to the Department of Justice, according to a US government source who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the administration's policy of silence on the matter. The source said the purpose of obtaining the report was to determine whether an investigation of the killing by the Justice Department (DOJ) was appropriate.
Although the report's revelations and conclusions about the killing of Dogan and the five other victims were widely reported in the Turkish media last week, not a single story on the report has appeared in US news media. [After Porter wrote this, the New York Times mentioned the report very briefly - JFP.]
The fact-finding mission was chaired by Judge Karl T. Hudson-Phillips, Q.C., retired judge of the International Criminal Court and former attorney general of Trinidad and Tobago, and included Sir Desmond de Silva, Q.C. of the United Kingdom, former chief prosecutor of the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone and Ms. Mary Shanthi Dairiam of Malaysia, founding member of the board of directors of the International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific. The mission interviewed 112 eyewitnesses to the Israeli attack in London, Geneva, Istanbul and Amman, Jordan.
2) Israel Stops Jewish Activists From Entering Gaza
Dina Kraft, New York Times, September 28, 2010
Tel Aviv - Israeli navy commandos peacefully commandeered a catamaran sailed by an international group of Jewish activists on Tuesday trying to break Israel's blockade on Gaza.
The 10 activists, from Israel, the United States, Britain and Germany, among them an Israeli 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, responded defiantly to the Israeli navy when it hailed to them from a frigate demanding they identify themselves and give their destination.
"We are going to Gaza," the group responded from the deck of the 30-foot catamaran, Irene, festooned with peace flags and carrying humanitarian aid, according to a Twitter update posted on its Web site.
3) Forward Observer: Costs of War
George C. Wilson, CongressDaily, September 27, 2010
In his new book out Monday, Obama's Wars, Bob Woodward quotes President Obama as telling Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "I'm not spending a trillion dollars" in Afghanistan. But guess what? The United States has already spent or committed a third of that $1 trillion on Afghanistan before Obama and his generals have launched their major offensive in the country with almost 100,000 U.S. troops.
The dollars spent or committed to combat terrorism since the attack on the United States by four hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, have been tracked down and added up in a report just issued by the Congressional Research Service. The total through the Pentagon's fiscal 2010 supplemental comes to $1.12 trillion, according to CRS, with no end in sight.
To date, the CRS report by Amy Belasco figures the extra, or "incremental," cost of adding the burden of fighting terrorists on top of what the U.S. military was already doing before 9/11 comes to $750.8 billion for Iraq and $336 billion for Afghanistan. Another $28.5 billion went for making it harder for terrorists to attack us, while $5.5 billion in the new CRS report is listed as "unallocated."
But no matter which political party prevails in the elections, there is another cost elephant in the nation's living room.
This is the cost of treating the visible and invisible wounds of the veterans who are fighting these wars. House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., is among those in Congress who have looked at the tidal wave of bills about to crash over us and recoiled in horror.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes in their book The Three Trillion Dollar War write that "the Pentagon keeps two sets of book[s]. The first is the official casualty list posted on the Defense Department website. The second, hard-to-find set of data is available only on a different website and can be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. This data shows that the total number of soldiers who have been wounded, injured or suffered from disease is double the number wounded in combat."
4) This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan
T. Christian Miller, ProPublica, Sep. 23
More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America's battlefields.
More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Labor, which tracks contractor deaths. In the same period, 235 soldiers died, according to Pentagon figures.
5) C.I.A. Steps Up Drone Attacks on Taliban in Pakistan
Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, September 27, 2010
Washington - The C.I.A. has drastically increased its bombing campaign in the mountains of Pakistan in recent weeks, American officials said. The strikes are part of an effort by military and intelligence operatives to try to cripple the Taliban in a stronghold being used to plan attacks against American troops in Afghanistan.
As part of its covert war in the region, the C.I.A. has launched 20 attacks with armed drone aircraft thus far in September, the most ever during a single month, and more than twice the number in a typical month. This expanded air campaign comes as top officials are racing to stem the rise of American casualties before the Obama administration's comprehensive review of its Afghanistan strategy set for December. American and European officials are also evaluating reports of possible terrorist plots in the West from militants based in Pakistan.
Over all the spy agency has carried out 74 drone attacks this year, according to the Web site The Long War Journal, which tracks the strikes. A vast majority of the attacks - which usually involve several drones firing multiple missiles or bombs - have taken place in North Waziristan.
The Obama administration has enthusiastically embraced the C.I.A.'s drone program, an ambitious and historically unusual war campaign by American spies. According to The Long War Journal, the spy agency in 2009 and 2010 has launched nearly four times as many attacks as it did during the final year of the Bush administration.
But the C.I.A.'s campaign has also raised concerns that the drone strikes are fueling anger in the Muslim world. The man who attempted to detonate a truck filled with explosives in Times Square told a judge that the C.I.A. drone campaign was one of the factors that led him to attack the United States.
6) European Parliament passes anti-ACTA declaration
Nate Anderson, Ars Technica, September 8, 2010
Today 377 members of the European Parliament adopted a written declaration on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in which they demand greater transparency, assert that ISPs should not up end being liable for data sent through their networks, and say that ACTA "should not force limitations upon judicial due process or weaken fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and the right to privacy."
The "written declaration" has no binding force; any MEP can issue one (there's a 200-word maximum), which is adopted when more than half of all MEPs sign on. If adopted, "written declarations are printed and posted on a board at the entrance to the Chambers in Strasbourg and Brussels." They also go up on the Web and get passed on to the European Commission.
But the declaration does give the ACTA negotiators a sense of the parliamentary will; in this case, Parliament has many concerns about both substance and process.
Some of these have already been addressed; the most recent leaked ACTA draft shows that ISP liability has been removed, for instance. Others, like concerns of access to medicines, especially those in transit from countries with looser patent systems, continue to be areas of concern-and have been for some time.
7) Petraeus Says Taliban Have Reached Out to Karzai
Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, September 27, 2010
Parwan, Afghanistan - The top American commander in Afghanistan said Monday that high-level Taliban leaders had reached out to senior Afghan government officials in the context of starting reconciliation discussions that could pave the way to end the fighting in Afghanistan.
For months, efforts at reconciliation have been stalled at every level, and this is the first explicit public suggestion that there is extensive behind-the-scenes contact between insurgents and the Afghan government.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, in a meeting with reporters after a tour of the largely United States-run detention facility here, where American forces detain Afghans they suspect of supporting the insurgency, said the Taliban were making efforts to establish contact with senior members of the Afghan government.
"There are very high-level Taliban leaders who have sought to reach out to the highest levels of the Afghan government and, indeed, have done that," General Petraeus said.
The talks are continuous, according to people knowledgeable about them.
General Petraeus's embrace of talks comes at a difficult moment in the war and at a time when many politicians in the United States are searching for a way to bring the troops home as soon as possible. Popular support has ebbed amid a steady drumbeat of reports documenting the Taliban's persistence despite the killing of large numbers.
Although on its face a peace deal with the Taliban appears to be a necessary ingredient for the withdrawal of international troops, a reconciliation with the insurgents is also so controversial among many Afghans that the United States is in a delicate position in supporting it. At this point it seems there is an acknowledgment that it would not be possible to win against an insurgency of this scale and that a peace deal might be a major part of any exit strategy.
A spokesman for Mr. Karzai confirmed that there had been contacts with the Taliban at every level, but he cautioned that the contacts could not be characterized as even the beginning of negotiations. "In the last few months, there have been signs and signals from different levels of Afghan Taliban," said Waheed Omer, the spokesman. "There have been different levels of contact - sometimes direct and sometimes indirect," Mr. Omer said.
The outreach began shortly after the peace jirga, or assembly, in early June when Mr. Karzai announced his plans for a program of reintegration and reconciliation, but no formal negotiations or discussions have begun, he said.
Mr. Omer said Taliban figures had made numerous efforts to reach out, and that once the High Peace Council was appointed, which Mr. Karzai was expected to do this week, the efforts would proceed. Similar efforts by emissaries of Mr. Karzai stalled after the capture of senior Taliban leaders by Pakistan in February.
8) Diplomats Try to Save Mideast Talks
Ethan Bronner and Mark Landler, New York Times, September 27, 2010
Jerusalem - Israel's decision this weekend to end its freeze on West Bank Jewish settlement construction sent diplomats on three continents scurrying on Monday to keep the Middle East peace talks alive. And while the discussions covered many topics, in the end they came down to one stubborn goal: how to curb settlement construction.
While negotiators huddled in New York and Washington, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the international envoy to the process, shuttled around Jerusalem, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France met with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in Paris, and extended an invitation to him and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, for a meeting there next month. Both accepted.
Mr. Sarkozy called on Monday for an end to Jewish settlement building, as did the United Nations secretary general and the American and British governments.
Palestinian officials said they found it hard to understand how the Obama administration could express its opposition to the building but not have it stopped.
"We cannot accept the American position that says it is against settlements but doesn't lead to an end to them," said Mr. Shaath, the negotiator. "We need a practical position from the United States against settlements. I am surprised that America is unable to stop them."
9) Iran to press for recognition of 'nuclear rights'
AFP, September 28, 2010
Tehran - Iran will press to have its "nuclear rights" recognised in talks with world powers who accuse Tehran of seeking atomic weapons, a foreign ministry spokesman told reporters on Tuesday. "Iran has announced its view points and readiness for talks with the P5+1. We are seeking to have Iran's nuclear rights recognised in these talks," Ramin Mehmanparast said at his weekly press briefing.
He said Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili was seeking to set "a date and venue" to meet EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, who represents permanent UN Security Council members and Germany - known as the P5+1.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week said an Iranian official may meet with Ashton in October "for preparatory work" in a new bid to open negotiations on Iran's contested nuclear drive. "If Ms Ashton contacts the Iranian representative she can set a time for talks," the Iranian leader told a press conference in New York.
He also said that "in October the representative of Iran will meet with one member of the P5+1 to decide the framework of talks."
10) US lawmakers put off action on Cuba travel ban
AFP, September 28, 2010
Washington - A key US congressional panel has indefinitely postponed voting on legislation to end what amounts to a ban on US nationals traveling to Cuba, the committee's chairman said Tuesday. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman said he was putting off the vote, which had been set for Wednesday, because of a heavy workload on what could be lawmakers' last day in session before November elections.
"That makes it increasingly likely that our discussion of the bill will be disrupted or cut short by votes or other activity on the House floor," the Democrat said in a statement. "Accordingly, I am postponing consideration of H.R. 4645 until a time when the committee will be able to hold the robust and uninterrupted debate this important issue deserves."
"I firmly believe that when we debate and vote on the merits of this legislation, and I intend for it to be soon, the right to travel will be restored to all Americans," he added.
The decision clouded the fate of congressional efforts to ease measures targeting Cuba, especially since Democrats, who are more likely to favor doing so, are expected to suffer heavy losses in November 2 legislative elections.
11) Retired Military Officers Urge Lifting of Cuba Travel Ban
Laura Rozen, Politico, September 27, 2010
Nine retired U.S. military officers are urging that the U.S. travel ban to Cuba be lifted.
In a letter to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-Calif.), retired generals Paul Eaton, Robert Gard, John Castellaw, John Hutson, David Irvine, John Johns, Stephen Xenakis, and retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson argue that Cuba does not pose a threat to the security of the United States. Eaton currently serves as a senior advisor to the progressive National Security Network, and Wilkerson was an advisor to former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"We have already seen how the loosened travel restrictions for families visiting relatives in Cuba have begun to build good will and change from within in Cuba," the retired U.S. military officers write. "Lifting the overall travel ban would extend this cultural and economic engagement and … [enhance] our security by removing unnecessary sources of discontent in a country so close to the United States."
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