Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sat stone silent inside the courtroom at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, refusing to answer routine questions from the judge presiding over his arraignment for war crimes. Four other co-defendants, who are being tried alongside the man now commonly referred to as KSM, took their cues from the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and also refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the military commissions, in what their lawyers described as an act of “peaceful resistance.”

That was the scene at the chaotic, marathon hearing that took place at Guantanamo May 7, and just the latest example of how, over the years, KSM “has controlled the legal proceedings against him, organizing his fellow captives to act as a group and then putting himself in charge,” journalists Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer write in their timely and groundbreaking new book, “The Hunt for KSM.”

KSM “mocked the military courts, preached, instructed, or obstructed as the need arose …” McDermott and Meyer write.

“The Hunt for KSM,” subtitled, “Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” is not just a page-turning spy thriller that masterfully reveals how the FBI and CIA failed to capture Mohammed at least a half-dozen times in the eight years leading up to 9/11, but it’s also a story about the investigative reporters’ own decade-long “hunt” for intelligence about “one of the worst mass murderers in American history.”

Ten years ago, while working as reporters at The Los Angeles Times, McDermott, Meyer and their colleague Patrick McDonnell published the first substantive profile of KSM, describing him as the “operational commander of Al Qaeda” most responsible for the terrorist organization’s attacks, whose significance was “underestimated” by the FBI.

“He was under everybody’s radar,” a senior FBI official told the reporters at the time. “We don’t know how he did it. We wish we knew…. He’s the guy nobody ever heard of.”

Exactly how KSM “did it” is what McDermott and Meyer were determined to find out. What they discovered in the decade since they published that 9,000-word report in The Los Angeles Times is truly disturbing and, yet again, undercuts the government’s narrative about who knew what and when. KSM eluded capture because no one, except for an FBI agent and a Port Authority detective, was looking for him prior to 9/11, yet everyone in intelligence and federal law enforcement circles knew where he was and knew what he was planning.

The FBI and CIA were so “laser focused” on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network, which McDermott said he believes never was and isn’t now an “existential threat to the US,” that the agencies failed to comprehend KSM’s importance. Furthermore, the CIA and FBI never connected the dots related to the intelligence information in their possession that indicated how both men had “joined forces,” one of the intelligence community’s “greatest mistakes, McDermott said.

The lapses continued well after 9/11, due, in part, to the blame game going on between the CIA and FBI over the catastrophic attacks.

“I thought about this for a long time,” McDermott said in an interview. “Not only could 9/11 have been prevented it should have been prevented. I just think the number of mistakes that allowed KSM to evade capture is legion. If they [the CIA/FBI] put the effort into it they would have easily found him.”

Meyer agreed with his co-author. He recently told NPR, “If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been taken off the battlefield or captured when the authorities had a chance to do that in the mid-’90s, there simply would not have been a 9/11 attack.”

The FBI is treated more favorably in their book, McDermott said, because the bureau “at least tried” to capture him.

A report I published with my colleague, Jeffrey Kaye, also described how, as early as 1999, a top-secret military intelligence unit likely identified the house where KSM planned the 9/11 attacks, according to documents we obtained. But for reasons that remain a mystery, the intelligence community appears to not have acted upon the information.

McDermott, who is also the author of a book on the 9/11 hijackers, “Perfect Soldiers,” said in addition to fleshing out the narrative about the “bureaucratic ineptitude” that allowed KSM to hide in plain sight while working on other terrorist attack plans, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, he and Meyer were also determined to craft a deeper story about KSM, the man and the intelligence officials who tracked him.

They split their reporting duties into “cops and robbers,” with McDermott traveling to Pakistan and the Middle East to speak with KSM’s associates and family members, and Meyer, currently co-director of the National Security Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, working his sources at the FBI and CIA.

“When you’re researching someone who are you going to talk to?” McDermott said. “You’re going to talk to friends, family and co-workers. You just keep knocking on doors, send letters, faxes, courier deliveries. Eventually, you find enough people who will talk to you that you have a story. And that’s what this was.”

Their gumshoe reporting paid off big time. KSM, the authors discovered, was a “rebellious” youth who, along with a cousin, “climbed the flagpole atop their elementary schoolhouse and tore down the Kuwaiti flag.” KSM was also an excellent student who “excelled” at science. At 16, KSM followed in the footsteps of his brother and began attending camps of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is where he “first heard the call to jihad.”

Humanizing KSM, however, was “stupidly difficult,” McDermott said.

“It was hard in a dumb, mulish way,” McDermott said. “I found KSM’s brother after looking for him for 10 years. And then he wouldn’t talk to me. He threw me off of his doorstep and threatened to have me arrested for invasion of privacy. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, man, your brother’s a mass murderer!’”

After KSM was captured in March 2003, McDermott said the CIA, then headed by George Tenet, ultimately won the internal blame war against the FBI over 9/11 failures, which ultimately allowed the agency to implement a program micromanaged by Vice President Dick Cheney: enhanced interrogation.

“Vice President Dick Cheney went on national television and warned that the United States would no doubt have to venture onto the ‘dark side’ in order to pursue and punish its enemies,” McDermott and Meyer write. “Cheney, more than any other individual, was the architect of the new War on Terror. He made it clear that doubt and nuance had no role to play in this new world. The FBI’s customary ways of doing business were not a fit for what Cheney had in mind, and perhaps chiefly for that reason the Bureau lost its status as the preeminent antiterror agency.”

McDermott said he believes the catalyst that led the Bush administration to implement the torture program was trying to find out “what’s the next attack?” I don’t agree with McDermott’s assertion as I am of the mind that the torture program was about exploitation, obtaining false confessions and turning captives into informants.

“The CIA was looking for something that didn’t exist,” McDermott said during our interview, explaining why KSM was brutalized. “The CIA’s sole focus was on the next attack. Here’s the problem: there was no next attack, there were hundreds of them. There were a multitude of plots. The CIA was looking for the next ‘spectacular’ and there was none. I’ve always wondered why torture was used too. Aside from the immorality of it, we know torture doesn’t work. The person being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop. But [the CIA] used it anyway. The outcome was almost fated.”

The information the CIA obtained by torturing KSM was “bad, made up,” he would later say, “so the torture would stop.” His false confessions, the cornerstone of the program, however, sent intelligence and law enforcement officials on “wild goose chases”–literally–in an attempt to stop nonexistent terrorist attacks.

“He had us chasing the goddamn geese in Central Park because he said some of them had explosives stuffed up their ass,” former FBI counterterrorism agent, Ali Soufan, told the authors.

McDermott and Meyer write that in addition to being waterboarded, a form of controlled drowning, 183 times, KSM was deprived of sleep for a week, “hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, beaten, kicked, suffocated, exposed to extreme cold and noise, denied food and sleep, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers and hung by his wrists until they bled.”

“KSM bragged later about sending American agents scurrying around the globe on the impossible task of trying to distinguish the truths from the half truths and lies,” McDermott and Meyer write.

Those details are what makes “The Hunt for KSM” required reading. Its revelations are an important reminder that the government has been in control of the narrative for far too long.

The years KSM spent at CIA black site prisons around the world, where his interrogators used methods of torture to extract false confessions, all but ensures that “his full story will never be told” and justice will never truly be served to the mass murderer.

“For reasons that perplex even its best friends, the United States has kept Mohammed in the shadows of its secret prisons for so long it seems likely he can now never be fully exposed to the light for fear of what he might say about what went on in the darkness.”

KSM secured his final victory a couple of years ago when Congress thwarted Attorney General Eric Holder’s efforts to prosecute KSM and four other 9/11 co-defendants in federal court in New York City. Democrat and Republican lawmakers feared his trial in Article III courts would make the city vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

It is through KSM’s “ability to strike fear, which is the first goal of all terrorism,” McDermott and Meyer write, that the true mastermind of the 9/11 attacks has been able to retain “his power,” even to this day, as evidenced by the initial response to Holder’s announcement about the venue in which KSM would be prosecuted.

“KSM, years after he was last able to issue a single order, remained, in some real sense, in command.”

A tag team of two contributors to Time Magazine’s Battleland blog have misrepresented the facts concerning the possibility that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales may have been under the influence of the controversial antimalarial drug mefloquine (also known as Lariam) when he allegedly killed 17 men, women and children in two villages outside Kandahar last March.

Using false information; faulty interpretation of documents and innuendo; and in one case, withholding key disclosures regarding their background, these authors took a serious issue – the dangerous psychiatric and neurotoxic effects of mefloquine on some people and the history of the use of this drug by the military – and twisted it to further an agenda that just happened to match US interests in limiting speculation about the Kandahar massacre to Bales.

One of the two authors, Mark Benjamin, who years ago had written a number of articles on mefloquine’s terrible side-effects, published his article on Bales and mefloquine at Huffington Post.

The other author, a former top Army psychiatrist, Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, has written three articles for Time’s Battleland that have strongly suggested Bales’ alleged crime was linked to mefloquine use. She recently also gave an interview on the topic to Nina Shapiro at Seattle Weekly.

Ritchie’s background in certain aspects is not well known and certainly is surprising, given the mefloquine issue. Currently, she is chief clinical offer for the District of Columbia’s Department of Mental Health. But back in 2002, she was a Lieutenant Colonel Ritchie, program director for mental health policy for the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and consultant on suicidal detainees at Guantanamo. Interestingly, this was at the same time all incoming detainees were forced to take large treatment doses of mefloquine, even as she likely had access to their medical records.

Read the rest of Kaye’s report at Truthout.

Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: art makes me smile, The U.S. Army

On Monday, the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey released a new report, “National Security Deserves Better: ‘Odd’ Recidivism Numbers Undermine the Guantánamo Policy Debate” (PDF), which analyzes the fundamental problems with the claims made by the Pentagon and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) regarding the numbers of alleged “recidivists” freed from Guantánamo — in other words, those who, in the words of the DNI, have been involved in “planning terrorist operations, conducting a terrorist or insurgent attack against Coalition or host-nation forces or civilians, conducting a suicide bombing, financing terrorist operations, recruiting others for terrorist operations, and arranging for movement of individuals involved in terrorist operations.”

As I have been explaining since May 2009, when the New York Times published a misleading front-page story claiming that 1 in 7 released prisoners had engaged in recidivism, there have been two main problems with the recidivism claims: firstly, that, over the last three years, little effort has been made to distinguish between “confirmed” and “suspected” cases of recidivism; and secondly that, as the claims became more outrageous in 2010 and 2011, with completely unsubstantiated allegations that 1 in 5 of the released prisoners were recidivists, and then 1 in 4, the mainstream media unquestioningly repeated these claims, even though they were not backed up with even a shred of evidence.

Last month, in my article, “Guantánamo and Recidivism: The Media’s Ongoing Failure to Question Official Statistics,” I challenged the latest claims made by the DNI – that 27.9 percent of the prisoners released from Guantánamo were recidivists — by noting that although the DNI claimed that 95 (15.9%) were described as “Confirmed of Reengaging,” and 72 others (12%) were described as “Suspected of Reengaging,” the lack of evidence for these claims was deeply troubling.

This was because, as I explained, in January 2011, when the New America Foundation issued its own report (PDF) challenging the DNI’s claims in December 2010 that 81 former prisoners (13.5 percent) were “confirmed” and 69 (11.5 percent) “suspected” of “reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after transfer,” the authors concluded, based on an assessment of available public documentation, that “the true rate for those who have taken up arms or are suspected of doing so is more like 6 percent, or one in 17,” with another 2.2 percent “engaged or suspected to have engaged with insurgent groups that attack or attempt to attack non-US targets”; in other words, 49 men in total, with just 36 “engaged or suspected to have engaged with insurgent groups that attack or attempt to attack the United States, US citizens, or US bases abroad.”

As I proceeded to explain:

There is a huge gulf between this analysis (of 36 men confirmed or suspected of hostile engagement with US interests) and the current claims by the DNI, in which 167 men are described as confirmed or suspected of [recidivism]. In addition, my own research over the last few years has provided no reason for believing the figures produced by the Director of National Intelligence. All available reports, for example, indicate that there are only a small number of problematical ex-prisoners from any countries except Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, and, according to Afghan and Saudi officials, the number of “recidivists” from these two countries is no more than 45 in total.

In the Seton Hall report, the authors focused on an important statement made by  Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, who is the Public Affairs Officer for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, and who, as I reported in March, told CNN that he “took exception” to media reports “characterizing the current recidivism rate at 28%.” He said that “the intelligence bar for someone confirmed of returning to terrorism is much higher,” as CNN described it, and, in his own words, explained, “Someone on the ‘suspected’ list could very possibly NOT be engaged in activities that are counter to our national security interests.”

Seton Hall added further damning information from Lt. Col. Breasseale’s comments in March, noting that he also stated:

[T]his document [the latest DNI assessment] makes a distinction between “Confirmed” v. “Suspected.” This is particularly relevant because there was confusion in some early media reports conflating the two, coming up with this odd 27-28% number. To be sure, “Confirmed” is more consistent with our actual intelligence data and “Suspected” is a much lower bar, triggering an additional review that is really more akin to a sort of “early watch” system.

With this important distinction established, Seton Hall Center for Policy and Research Fellow and Report co-author Lauren Winchester noted, “The government’s supposed Confirmed is no more than 16%, and the number, since President Obama took office, is just over 3%.”

It is, of course, hugely important to have these kinds of figures established, especially because, in February, a Republican Congressional report issued by the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee (PDF) deliberately failed to distinguish between the alleged “confirmed” and “suspected” cases, highlighting a figure of 27 percent, and annoying the Democrats on the committee to such an extent that refused to sign it, and instead issued a damning minority report (PDF).

As a result of research that I am currently undertaking, I expect to be able to demonstrate, in the not too distant future, that a more reliable figure for the alleged recidivism of former prisoners is closer to 10 percent than the 15.9 percent alleged by the government in the latest claims made by the DNI, but in the meantime I wholeheartedly recommend the Seton Hall report, which, as explained in a press release:

documents wild fluctuations — both up and down — in the number of released Guantánamo detainees said by the government to have re-engaged in activities that are counter to the United States’ security interests; shows that the government knew that GTMO was populated with “low level” detainees, but engaged in a public relations campaign to the contrary, claiming it housed “the worst of the worst”; and documents a sampling of hundreds of detainees who have returned to normal lives, including attending college, going to law school, working as electricians and even working as translators for American soldiers in Afghanistan, and warning the United States of a plot to send mail bombs into America, thereby thwarting the attempt.

Professor Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research, commented, “The HASC [House Armed Services Committee] spent one year producing a report that is misleading and perpetuates a falsehood. The shreds of justification  for GTMO disappear in the harsh truth: Once released, the so called ‘worst of the worst’ by and large return to the same peaceful lives they lived before their detention.”

Professor Denbeaux’s assessment is accurate, and is important not just to establish the lies that have been told by US officials about released prisoners, but also, more significantly, to pave the way for the release of prisoners still held — 89 of the 171 men still in Guantánamo — who have been cleared for release, but who are still held in large part because of the distorted claims about recidivism that have been cynically used over the last three years by those whose ulterior motive is to keep Guantánamo open forever, and to ensure that no one who is still there will ever be released.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Joseph Rao Kony is the head of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan guerrilla group

There is no doubt that the 30-minute video “Kony 2012” by the advocacy group Invisible Children has raised much awareness regarding the relatively under-reported atrocities committed by the Ugandan rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

It is also true that the video, which boasts over 80 million views on YouTube so far, has been subjected to much – I think fair – scrutiny. Criticism of the motives, accuracy and objectivity of the video’s makers has stirred a rather healthy debate on the issue, where alternative ways forward were discussed.

However, I could not help but wonder how Invisible Children – whose founders are reported to have evangelical leanings – would have fashioned their video had the LRA been a Muslim extremist group (instead of being a Christian one, whose former name was the “Uganda Christian Democratic Army”).

I am not suggesting here that the group’s professed Christian beliefs are behind their abduction and enslavement of more than 30,000 children over the period of 25 years, where some of the boys become child soldiers, forced or brainwashed into murdering their own parents, and many of the girls end up as sex slaves after being captured.

The LRA fighters would chop off the arms, legs or ears of their victims. Sometimes they would padlock their lips. As a result of their terrorising violence, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced.

The group does – bizarrely – claim to be fighting for the establishment of the rule of the Ten Commandments in a theocratic Uganda (although they have been active in three other African countries: South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic).

But in the video, you hear the claim that the LRA leader is “not fighting for any cause but only to maintain power” (without any mention of the group’s own proclaimed reasons). That may very well be true of many fanatics around the world, but how many of those would have their religious views deleted from a critical video (maybe to avoid confusing their extreme interpretation with that of the mainstream understanding of a religion)?

Not many Muslim ones, I would argue. Even the full name of the group – the Lord’s Resistance Army – was not even pronounced once (although it did appear in writing) during the whole video. Instead you only hear the LRA acronym. Perhaps the video makers did not wish to “take the Lord’s name in vain.”

According to Vincent Otti, the now deceased second-in-command of the group, the LRA is “fighting in the name of God. God is the one helping us in the bush. That’s why we created this name, Lord’s Resistance Army.

“And people always ask us, are we fighting for the [biblical] Ten Commandments of God. That is true – because the Ten Commandments of God is the constitution that God has given to the people of the world. All people. If you go to the constitution, nobody will accept people who steal, nobody could accept to go and take somebody’s wife, nobody could accept to innocently kill, or whatever. The Ten Commandments carries all this.”

The above quote suggests that the enemies of the LRA are not “innocent” and therefore killing them is justified. And Joseph Kony, a former Catholic preacher, is himself reported to use biblical references – mainly passages from the Pentateuch – to justify mutilation and murder.

Elaborating on that logic, one of Kony’s most trusted commanders, named Moses, was quoted as saying: “If someone has done something bad to you, you have to kill them! Go and read in Matthew, chapter what and what, it is stated that if your right hand causes trouble, cut if off! It is there in the Bible!”

Kony is reported to have named one of his sons “George Bush,” and although the former U.S. president certainly does not condone the LRA (which is more than can be said for the American Christian conservative Rush Limbaugh who had defended the group in a radio gaffe), both men – Kony and Bush – claim to receive direct messages from God.

In addition to the overtly religious rhetoric of LRA leaders, testimonies from boys who have escaped from the grip of the terror group point to religious symbolism, where the child soldiers would make cross signs on their chests, foreheads, shoulders and guns, using special oil that is said to have the power of the Holy Spirit. And they were told that those who die – from all sides – must have broken religious commands.

Of course the LRA’s mystic brand of Christianity is different from the mainstream understanding of the faith (although that too had long been abused to promote terror). And the reality is that the conflict involving the LRA has never really been of a religious nature. It is much more complicated than that.

But that’s true of many violent groups who use religious rhetoric to make political points. These groups, like the LRA, can be found making strange bedfellows – sometimes forging unexpected alliances and fighting unlikely enemies.

However, if any group professed to have committed some of the aforementioned atrocities in the name of Islam – regardless of how far such actions are from the mainstream of that religion – it is quite common that the faith (and by extension everyone who believes in it) would take the blame.

It would not be about one man – or his army – gone mad or on a quest for power, as the video suggests about the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Mamoon Alabbasi is a news editor and translator based in London. His Op-eds, reports, and reviews have appeared in a number of media outlets.

This report was written by veteran intelligence reporter Richard Sale and originally published on Truthout.

They are dying one by one.

They are Iran’s nuclear scientists, and they are being murdered. Since 2007, five Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in Iranian territory, many victims dying from magnetic bombs that terrorists had attached to the exterior of their cars.

The latest attack took place on January 11, 2012, when Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan, deputy director in the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, died without warning in a blast in Tehran shortly after two assailants on a motorcycle placed a bomb on his car.

According to news reports, confirmed by Truthout, the United States denied that it was to blame for the killing of the 32-year-old Roshan after Tehran said Washington and Israel were responsible for the attack. “I want to categorically deny any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran,” US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters when asked about Iranian allegations over the attack.

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor added, “The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this. We strongly condemn all acts of violence, including acts of violence like this.”

Former and serving US intelligence officials said that President Barack Obama reacted angrily to the latest killing because, since his election, he had tried to prevent any acceleration in the covert US-Israeli war directed at Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Israeli program, which has been in place for almost a decade, involves not only targeted killings of key Iranian assets, but also disrupting and sabotaging the Iran nuclear technology by infecting Iran’s enrichment computers with a US-Israel virus that heavily damaged them and by sabotaging Iran’s purchasing network abroad, these sources said.

US opposition to the program initially intensified as President Obama made overtures aimed at thawing decades-old tension between the two countries. Part of his strategy was driven by America’s desire to use Iran’s roads into Afghanistan to help resupply US-NATO forces there.

But in spite of Obama’s desire to relax tensions, Israel continues to carry out killings using its proxies, including an armed group of Iranian dissidents, a group that has high-level political backers in the United States despite being a terrorist organization.

Former senior CIA officials said that Israeli terrorists were members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), who are paid by Israel to do targeted killings of Iranian nationals.

“The MEK is being used as the assassination arm of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service,” said Vince Cannistraro, former CIA chief of counterterrrorism. He said that the MEK is in charge of executing “the motor attacks on Iranian targets chosen by Israel. They go to Israel for training, and Israel pays them.”

The MEK has a shadowy and unsavory history. Founded in the 1970s, the group was stridently anti-shah and allied itself with the dictatorship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from which it received most of its supplies. Performing security for Saddam, the MEK assisted him in the slaughter of his domestic opponents and the massacre of Iraqi Shias and Kurds in the 1991 uprising.

As the military wing of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK targeted Iranian officials and government facilities in Iran and abroad. The group also attacked and killed Americans in the 1970s. According to one former senior CIA official, the MEK is particularly violent. In France, they did killings in Paris, including six or seven US Army sergeants. He added that the French “were terrified of them.”

Its most spectacular act of terror was the 1991 near-simultaneous attack on 13 countries around the world.

In 2003, the United States listed the NCRI as a terrorist organization and closed its Washington office. US forces in Iraq captured the MEK’s weapons and turned the MEK over for investigation of terrorist acts. Since then, the group has been peeling off Iranian nuclear scientists one by one.

When I asked Paul Pillar, a 28-year CIA veteran, whether Israel was killing secondary or tertiary scientists instead of its major ones, he replied, “Israel kills any Iranians it can.”

The range of damage caused by the MEK is not confined to merely killing individuals. On October 12, just before Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to arrive in Lebanon, a huge blast destroyed an underground site near the town of Khorramabad in western Iran that housed most of Iran’s Shehab-3 medium-range missiles capable of reaching Israel and Iraq. A far right-wing Israeli web site, Debka, reported that Iran has suffered a blow” to its nuclear program. The blast killed 18 and wounded several more. The MEK was strongly suspected as the killers, but “There is no conclusive evidence yet,” said Cannistraro. But one former senior US intelligence official said, “Israel did it using the MEK and Kurdish fighters.”

Early History

Mossad has a long history of killing opponents. At first, Israel viewed Palestinians as the chief threat, killing off several Black September assassins involved in the 1972 Munich massacres. In 1986, right-wingers in Israel plotted to kill Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and replace him with someone who would be unacceptable to the West. Mossad’s motives were not simply revenge, but a desire to ruin any chance of a Middle East peace. Israel’s moderates pointed out that Arafat was the legitimate leader of the Palestinians, and that, while the best of a bad lot, he was an educated man and courageous. The debate finally decided against killing him.

In the early 1980s, the chief threat to Israel’s existence was no longer Arafat, but Arab scientists. On June 7, 1981, in “Operation Sphinx,” Israel’s fighter planes destroyed the Iraq nuclear complex, Tamuze 17, at Osirak. Israel, then set out to eliminate Arab scientists that could be seen as a threat to Israel’s future security. “Israel has been killing Iranian or even Arab nuclear scientists for some time,” said a veteran CIA station chief.

A former senior Department of Defense (DoD) official said, “Israel killed Arab scientists without compunction.”

An incident recounted by former Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky in his book, “By Way of Deception,” (verified by my interview with him) told how Mossad targeted an Arab nuclear scientist, an Egyptian from Cairo, who assisted Iraq’s nuclear program after Osirak.

Mossad and Aman, Israel’s military intelligence group, did the planning, but it was Mossad that did the killing. Mossad’s chain of reasoning was Byzantine. Mossad officially believes that it kills only people who have Israeli blood on their hands, but the Egyptian had to be killed because he would have had the blood of Israel’s children on his hands if he had completed his nuclear project. So why wait?

The scientist was passionate about his work, having said he would pursue this program of building an Arab nuclear weapon even if it cost him his life. When he arrived for a stay in Paris, Mossad approached the scientist directly and tried to recruit him. They got a volley of abuse instead. Then, Mossad sent in a hooker. After the scientist had sex and had gone to sleep, two Mossad agents with a passkey got in and slit his throat.

His blood-soaked body was found by a chambermaid. Nothing had been stolen, no money, no documents. When the hooker heard about the matter, she was shocked. After all, she knew the man had been alive when she’d left him. To protect herself, she went to the French police and reported that when she had arrived, the scientist was angry because someone had approached him offering him money for information. After talking to the police, the hooker told her story to a colleague, who unknowingly passed it to a sayanim, a Mossad volunteer. Such people were all over Paris.

A few weeks later in July of 1982, the hooker was working on the Left Bank when a Mercedes pulled up and the driver asked her to come to his side of the car. As she leaned in to talk, another Mercedes came speeding up and the first driver suddenly pushed the hooker into the oncoming car. She was killed instantly.

Both victims were handled by Mossad in different ways. The hooker’s killing was classified as an “operational emergency.” The decision to kill her was made quickly and emanated from an ultra-secret internal system involving a formal “execution list,” that required the personal approval of the Israeli prime minister. The number of names on that list varied considerably. The request for a killing was made by Mossad to the prime minister. (Israeli targets are different from Jewish targets). The prime minister must sign the order, read the execution list and initial each name on it.

No state has any ethics, only its own interests, said a British diplomat, but Israel is just as remorseless a killer as any of its self-designated enemies. Israel’s training of the secret police of terrorist countries often gets it into trouble and compromises its stance as the region’s Western democracy. For example, until the fall of Iran’s shah, Israel trained the Third Department of SAVAK, the shah’s dreaded secret police. It sold weapons and intelligence to Serbian dictator Sloban Milosevic. When Israel wanted to obtain the head of an Exocet shipping missile, it agreed to train Chile’s secret police to kill its enemies. Mossad likes to keep its techniques to itself, but it trained Chile’s assassins and got its missile. In September 1976, I was three blocks away when I heard the blast along Embassy Row in Washington and found a gutted automobile and ambulances when I arrived. The victims were Orlando Letelier, 44, a former Chilean cabinet minister, and his American aide, Ronnie Moffit, 25. Israel wasn’t directly responsible – but indirectly it was.

The Rationale

As terrorist/intelligence correspondent for UPI, I wrote a story in January 2003 about how the Bush administration had given permission to Israel to assassinate on US soil. Following phone calls and a trip to Washington, I met with a former Israeli Defense Force member with ties to Israeli intelligence, Gal Luft. We talked a great deal about Israel’s assassinations, and Luft soon produced a masterful piece on it, “The Logic of Israel’s Targeted Killing,” for The Middle East Quarterly.

In it, Luft said that Israelis “dislike the term ‘assassination policy.’” He said that they would rather use another term, “extrajudicial punishment,” “selective targeting” or “long-range hot pursuit,” to describe this particular pillar of their counterterrorism doctrine. He then noted that, since the 1970s, “dozens of terrorists have been assassinated by Israel’s security forces, and in the two years of the Aqsa intifada, there have been at least 80 additional cases of Israel gunning down or blowing up Palestinian militants involved in the planning and execution of terror attacks.”

Luft acknowledged that many thought the killings illegal or operationally senseless because “assassinating Palestinian militants only brings harsh retaliatory action, resulting in even more Israeli casualties.” He conceded that it “infringes on the sovereignty of foreign political entities and because it gives the security services discretion to decide on the killing of certain individuals without due process.” But he concluded thus: “the policy does have shortcomings. What is less apparent is the profound cumulative effect of targeted killing on terrorist organizations. Constant elimination of their leaders leaves terrorist organizations in a state of confusion and disarray. Those next in line for succession take a long time to step into their predecessors’ shoes. They know that by choosing to take the lead, they add their names to Israel’s target list, where life is Hobbesian.”

Pillar recently mounted a brilliant counterargument to Luft in The National Interest, entitled “Deeper into Terrorism.” He said, “With or without confirmation of details of this story, the assassinations are terrorism. (The official US government definition of terrorism for reporting and statistic-keeping purposes is ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents.’)”

Noting that assassination is immoral, he added, “Terrorism denies the high ground to anyone who uses it, including the use of it in disagreements with Iran. It also hastens the slide through mutually reinforcing hostility into what may be a far more destructive form of violence (i.e., a war). Although the United States has not been involved in the assassinations, the nature of its relationship with Israel, both real and perceived (President Obama commented the other day about staying in ‘lockstep’ with Israel on Iran), means that Israel’s actions suck the United States farther down the slide.”

Specialization

Assassinations used to be quick, sloppy, haphazard and often relied on luck. This has changed. Targeted killing today is much more sophisticated and requires a lot of preparation and training by different teams. There are those who plan an attack, but do not carry it out. The planning groups do research; rely on field reports, files, communications traffic. They observe the victims’ movements, their locales, the places they frequent, traffic patterns. They study logistics, escape routes, access. They provide cover stories, fake passports and false identities. They figure out where the target is likely to stay.

There can be complications. In the 1970s, a Mossad team mistakenly shot a Norwegian waiter, thinking he was Ali Hassan Salemheh, the mastermind of the Munich massacre. Phony identities and false passports can backfire. Six suspected Mossad agents were expelled by Dubai when it was found they were using forged Irish passports. Ireland replied by expelling an Israeli Embassy official.

The Logic of Events

Repeated insults to Iranian sovereignty meant that Tehran would one day begin to stage reprisals for Mossad killings in countries with an Israeli presence. Countries with weak security would be Iran’s battlefields of choice for hitting back at Israel.

This finally happened. On February 13, one of Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah, launched attacks in New Delhi, Georgia and a site in Bangkok. The attack on Israel’s Embassy in New Delhi was well-planned and well-executed. It was possible only by painstaking collection of information regarding the movements and activities of Israeli diplomats, and a capability for undetected clandestine activity in Indian territory for the procurement of explosive material and the fabrication of the improvised explosive device (IED), according to a friend of this reporter, Bahukumbi Raman, a former senior official in India’s CIA. In an email with multiple recipients, Raman said the attack coincided with the fourth anniversary of the assassination of a senior leader of the Hezbollah in Damascus and the first anniversary of the death of two Iranian nuclear scientists in Teheran caused by a similar sticky bomb explosion.

Talya Yehoshua-Kioren, wife of the Defense Ministry representative in India, and three others were injured by a sticky bomb planted on her SUV. At almost exactly the same time, a similar device was safely defused in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi due to the detection and neutralization of the IED before it could explode.

Two theories immediately sprang to life. One was that Israel had faked the attacks itself; the other, that the Hezbollah proxies of Iran were the culprits. According to Pillar the second surmise was the correct one. “The wife of an Israeli Embassy official is a high value target,” he told me.

One serving intelligence official said, “The Iranian leadership has worked to reduce its own terrorist arm. Picking New Delhi or Georgia demonstrates Iran’s increasing desperation in the face of so many verbal attacks.”

A right-wing Israeli site, Debka, said, “… Iran and Hezbollah are clearly determined to keep on trying until they achieve their objective of killing targeted Israelis.”

The fear is that the vicious circle of Iran-Israeli reprisals will prove destabilizing to the world order. Several sources, including former US diplomats, told me that seeing your enemy as the seat of all evil in the world, being obsessed with the special wickedness of your opponent, blinds people to the logic of events. Seeing a foreign policy predicament as a melodrama with good versus bad freezes history into insoluble dilemmas where any common ground or parallel interests are irrelevant. Assassinations can change history, but they don’t necessarily achieve the long-term objectives of the agencies that employ them, said a former DoD official.

The basis of Israel’s lavish financing of the MEK is to try to delay any Iranian progress towards a nuclear weapon, even if Iran has not decided to make one, but the fear that Iran might have a weapon calls up a vision of Iran as “a regional marauder that would recklessly throw its weight around the Middle East in damaging ways, according to Pillar. And he pointed out that there is already such a state in the Middle East. It is Israel.

In The National Interest, he said, “This state invades neighboring countries, ruthlessly inflicting destruction on civilian populations, and seizes and colonizes territory through military force. It also uses terrorist group proxies as well as its own agents to conduct assassinations in other countries in the region.” Pillar still holds these views.

In a 2009 article for Middle East Times, this reporter interviewed Pat Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, about Israel’s assassinations. He said, “That’s what the Israelis would do, what we would expect them to do. They would kill Iranian scientists.”

Asked about the mounting administration disapproval, Clawson said of the killings, “It would be implausible to call off all covert ops.” He added, “If the US pressures Israel, then the Israelis will simply stop talking to us about it.”

Pillar pointed out that unlike Iran, Israel has never signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or admitted an international inspector to any of its nuclear facilities and, in fact, Israel “has kept its nuclear program completely out of reach of any international scrutiny or arms control regime and does not even acknowledge the program’s existence. It is so intent on maintaining its regional nuclear weapons monopoly.”

He added, “The United States needs to distance itself as much as possible from this ugliness, for the sake of adhering to its own principles as well as trying to avoid sliding any further toward catastrophe.” Pillar confirmed these views in an interview.

A former senior US military official summed it up, “Israel is out of step with American policy.”

Richard Sale was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, with his entry given a National Press Club Award for “excellence in diplomatic reporting” in 1989. He has been reporting on intelligence since 1977. Sale’s book, “Clinton’s Secret Wars,” was selected by the History and Military Book Clubs and Book of the Month Club.

Afghanistan, July 19: Obama outside Bagram airbase. Photo: U.S. Army.

“Rosy official statements” from top US military brass are misleading the American people into believing our occupation of Afghanistan is yielding solid results toward building a sustainable democracy.

Instead, says Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis – who traveled more than 9,000 miles and “talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces,” I witnessed the “absence of success on virtually every level,” Col. Davis said.

Col. Davis said that in his travels, he “saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.”

He declares that he “saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.”

He adds that, “From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.” He characterized their performance as “from bad to abysmal.”

While classification limits what he can say publicly, “I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.”

For example, he writes, on his first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. he arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier, he said.

“Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain. “What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”

“As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed. ‘No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!’ “

“According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free,” he said.

“In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.

“As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack.

“We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.

The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.

“On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.

“To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.

In August, Davis went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground. Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Davis arrived in country in late 2010 for the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

He says he interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.

On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., Col. Davis visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar, and “talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander.”

“Here’s how the conversation went:”

Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”

Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.

“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.”

“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them.

“Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe. “And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”

“That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.”

“In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out,” He said, adding:

“Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war. As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.”

Davis notes that Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.

“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote.

“They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”

“Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success,” he said.

“Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.”

Davis concluded: “If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.”

Unlike most whistleblowers, Davis did not report up his chain of command. Instead, he sent a report to Congress, another to the Defense Department’s Inspector General, and released a third for public consumption via the civilian press.

It remains unclear how the military will treat Davis’ unusual form of whistleblowing.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

But many are suggesting that the US organizations are simply being used as pawns in a larger game — the military’s increasingly desperate efforts to make a deal with the country’s Muslim Brotherhood that would define and secure the Army’s role in the future Egypt.

The Background: Last week the Egyptian Ministry of Justice swooped down on the offices of all the major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country, searched the offices, confiscated computers and other files, and arrested 43 employees and charged them with “accepting funds and benefits from an international organization” to pursue activities “prohibited by law” and carrying out “political training programs.”

Accepting foreign funds was Mubarak’s bogeyman under his repressive and restrictive NGO law. Now that law has been held over by Mubarak’s successors, the military, which threatens to make it even more draconian.

In a letter to the SCAF (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces), Daphne McCurdy, a Senior Research Associate with the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) said: These groups have worked transparently and in cooperation with Egyptian authorities to help support Egypt’s democratic transition—a goal to which the ruling military council purports to be committed. Sixteen of those charged are American citizens, seriously threatening the future of the U.S.-Egypt relationship.”

This controversy is merely the latest chapter in a series of attacks against both Egyptian and international civil society organizations that escalated shortly after the ouster of President Mubarak one year ago.

The Egyptians gave Washington a heads-up regarding likely future developments back in July, when SCAF Major General Assar gave a talk at the United States Institute for Peace in Washington DC, in which he said that foreign funding to NGOs without government pre-approval “represents a danger, in light of the recent incidents where many police weaponry was lost, and about 20,000 prisoners escaped from the prisons of Egypt following the events experienced by the country.”

Later that month, Field Marshall Tantawy, head of the SCAF, said in an address to officers that “there are foreign players who feed and set up specific projects that some individuals carry out domestically, without understanding. It is possible that there is lack of understanding, that foreign players are pushing the people into inappropriate directions [since they do] not want stability for Egypt.”

It’s now clear that the government’s “investigation” into NGOs has been ongoing for months and that dozens of other organizations are also at risk. A leaked ministry of justice report in September 2011 listed 39 of the most vocal human rights organizations in Egypt as not registered under the Associations Law and said a further 28 were receiving foreign funds without prior authorization. The vast majority of those named were human rights and democracy organizations.

POMED, the influential Project on Middle East Democracy, reported that US authorities and human rights advocates expressed displeasure with the SCAF investigation. For example, the group said, while excerpts of the investigation’s report were leaked to the Egyptian press in September, the official report has never been made public nor have suspects been officially notified of the charges against them.

POMED also declared that it was not until IRI employee Sam LaHood – son of President Obama’s Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood — arrived at Cairo’s airport and was prohibited from boarding a flight that suspects were made aware that they were barred from travel.

POMED is a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Washington, DC, dedicated to examining how genuine democracies can develop in the Middle East and how the United States can best support that process.

Most recently, the Ministry of Justice announced it was referring 43 individuals to face trial, but the formal charges have yet to be delivered to the suspects. U.S. policymakers have also received inconsistent messages from the Egyptian government, as the ruling military council and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have sought to reassure the U.S. government and targeted organizations while the Ministry of Justice and Minister Aboul Naga have struck a defiant tone.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which earlier endorsed the investigation, denounced the American reaction to the NGO probe as inconsistent. “America does not allow any foreign organization to open branches and operate without a permit,” said Brotherhood Spokesperson Mahmoud Ghazlan. U.S. lawmakers have threatened to halt the $1.3 billion in promised military aid to Egypt in response to the investigation.

Generally being overlooked is that the organizations whose offices were raided and employees arrested have been well known to the Mubarak government – and approved, tacitly and overtly, for many years. Mubarak’s NGO law made it extremely difficult to operate in the human rights, democracy-building, and related fields. There were occasional prosecutions for accepting foreign funds without prior approval.

That’s what’s going on at the surface. But the backstory is far more Machiavellian, according to one of the most credible witnesses to the current scene in Egypt. He is Samer S. Shehata, Assistant Professor of Arab Politics at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington.

We asked Prof. Shehata if the Egyptians should be prosecuting these NGOs.

His answer: “Of course not. There is no justification for prosecuting or harassing these organizations. Many of them were in operation with the full knowledge of the government previously. Moreover, their activities are not detrimental to the political process or sovereignty.”

He said the question facing the government vis a vis NGOs is whether in the post-Mubarak Egypt, the procedures for establishing an NGO will be made easier, transparent and standard.”

But Shehata emphasized his view that, “I don’t think the moves against these organizations have much to do with what these organizations actually do (or what they did). This is political hardball between the SCAF and the US administration. One must assume that the SCAF knows what they are doing (escalating the challenge with the US administration) and they are trying to signal to the Obama administration that the US should not get involved or voice opinions regarding Egypt’s internal politics in the next, crucial period, in which some kind of a “transition” will be worked out between domestic political forces, most importantly the Muslim Brothers and the military, about the future shape of Egyptian politics.”

He added, “I think the issue of the NGOs is being used in a much larger and more important attempt to limit US statements and actions in the coming period.”

Shehata cautioned that commenting on the current NGO problem requires a certain degree of “reading the tea leaves.”

“The best assessment — and the one that makes the most sense — in this period is that “the actions against the NGOs signal to other NGOs in Egypt concerned with human rights, personal and political freedoms workers’ rights, etc. that the regime/SCAF could move against them. It must be a tremendous disincentive to vigorously criticize the current state of affairs, SCAF’s responsibility or the ‘transition’ period for many other domestic organizations.”

Shehata was asked, “What should the response of the US be vis a vis military aid, and where’s it all going to end?

He replied, “I can only imagine that the Egyptian regime will eventually drop the charges against the Americans affiliated with these NGOs, allowing them to leave the country and avoid any kind of prosecution.”

Other observers tell much the same story. For example, Prof. Lawrence Davidson of West Chester University told us, “My guess is that this is part of an unwritten agreement between the generals and the Muslim Brothers.  If you look at who these NGOs were helping, it was the elements that stand in opposition to both the Islamists and the army.  It might be that going after these groups is the price the Egyptian generals have to pay to keep the Muslim Brotherhood from sending their followers into the streets to join the liberal/secular/youth folks presently protesting.”

Back in Washington, the NGO situation created a firestorm of protest, with Senators warning of a “Disastrous” Rupture of U.S.-Egypt Ties. In a statement, US Senators John McCain, Kelly Ayotte, and Joe Lieberman warned Egypt’s government that the ongoing investigation into foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations could result in a “disastrous” rupture in ties with the US, saying, “harassment and prosecution” of US citizens must end, and “support for Egypt, including continued financial assistance, is in jeopardy.”

In an article published last week, Amnesty International said that NGOs in Egypt were being held “hostage,” and called for the “repressive laws on civil society” to be scrapped. “These international associations have become the latest scapegoats as the authorities desperately spin their story of foreign conspiracies,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.

But Egyptian Prime Minister Kamal Al Ganzouri dug his heels in, declaring  that Egypt “will not kneel” and “will not change [its] stance because of American aid.”

The response to the Prime Minister’s bravado comes from Joe Stork, the veteran official of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

He said, “The Egyptian authorities are using a discredited Mubarak-era law to prosecute nongovernmental groups while proposing even more restrictive legislation. The government should stop using the old law, halt the criminal investigations, and propose a law that respects international standards.”

He concluded: “This campaign targets the Egyptian human rights and democracy groups that were prevented from registering by Mubarak’s security forces. Foreign funding is their lifeline. Egypt’s military government is now using the kind of tactics used by Zimbabwe and Ethiopia to silence independent voices.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Photo/Wikimedia.

Human Rights Watch is charging that, despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a “budding police state” —  cracking down harshly during 2011 on freedom of expression and assembly by intimidating, beating, and detaining activists, demonstrators, and journalists.

The organization’s Middle East and North Africa director, Sarah Leah Whitson, warns that “Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees.”

Its World Report 2012 attributes the downward trajectory to the security services of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki” and armed gangs.

The report notes that in February, HRW “uncovered a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to the military office of the Prime Minister. The report added, “The same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity.”

The 676-page report report says, “Given the violent forces resisting the “Arab Spring,” the international community has an important role to play in assisting the birth of rights-respecting democracies in the region.”

The report documents a wide range of human rights abuses. For example, it says, “In the weeks before the last convoy of US troops left Iraq on December 18, Iraqi security forces rounded up hundreds of Iraqis accused of being former Baath Party members, most of whom remain in detention without charge.”

The pullout of U.S. troops has been marked by an “apolitical crisis and a series of terrorist attacks targeting civilians that have rocked the country.” But Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is not new and is unconnected to the US exit. A number of US Embassy cables released by Wikileaks refer to the torture of prisoners in Iraqi custody and of knowledge of some of it by US troops.

The annual report, which covers the state of human rights in some 90 countries, says that, during nationwide demonstrations in Iraq to “protest widespread corruption and demand greater civil and political rights,” security forces “violently dispersed protesters, killing at least 12 on February 25, and injuring more than 100. Baghdad security forces beat unarmed journalists and protesters that day, smashing cameras and confiscating memory cards.”

Earlier in the year, “in one of the worst incidents, government-backed thugs armed with wooden planks, knives, and iron pipes, beat and stabbed peaceful protesters and sexually molested female demonstrators as security forces stood by and watched, sometimes laughing at the victims,” the report charges.

In May, the report says, the Council of Ministers approved a Law on the Freedom of Expression of Opinion, Assembly, and Peaceful Demonstration, which “authorizes officials to restrict freedom of assembly to protect ‘the public interest’ and in the interest of ‘general order or public morals.’ This law still awaits parliamentary approval.

HRW comments that freedom of expression fared little better as “security forces routinely abused journalists covering demonstrations, using threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and confiscating or destroying their equipment.”

On September 8, the report says, “An unknown assailant shot to death Hadi al-Mahdi, a popular radio journalist often critical of government corruption and social inequality, at his home in Baghdad. Immediately before his death, HRW says al-Mahdi had received several phone and text message threats not to return to Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which was the focal point for the weekly demonstrations.”

Earlier, after attending the February 25 “Day of Anger” mass demonstration, security forces arrested, blindfolded, and severely beat him and three other journalists during a subsequent interrogation,” HRW says.

In January 2012, HRW says it “observed that Iraqi authorities had successfully curtailed the Tahrir Square anti-government demonstrations by
flooding the weekly protests with pro-government supporters and undercover security agents. Dissenting activists and independent journalists for the most part said that they no longer felt safe attending the demonstrations.”

The report continues, “Prison brutality, including torture in detention facilities, was a major problem throughout the year. In February, Human Rights Watch uncovered, within the Camp Justice military base in Baghdad, a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to al-Maliki’s military office.”

Beginning in late 2010, the report charges, Iraqi authorities transferred more than 280 detainees to the facility, which was controlled by the Army’s 56th Brigade and the Counter-Terrorism Service.

HRW added that “the same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity. More than a dozen former Camp Honor detainees told Human Rights Watch that detainees were held incommunicado and in inhumane conditions, many for months at a time. Detainees said interrogators beat them; hung them upside down for hours at a time; administered electric shocks to various body parts, including the genitals; and repeatedly put plastic bags over their heads until they passed out from asphyxiation.”

HRW also weighed in on the human rights situation in Iraqi Kurdistan. In what it called the “Silenced Spring,” HRW’s Samer Muscati recounts that  the Kurdistan Regional Government “promised a new era of freedom for Iraqi Kurds, but it seems no more respectful of Kurdish rights to free speech than the government that preceded it.”

He added, “In a time when the Middle East is erupting in demands to end repression, the Kurdish authorities are trying to stifle and intimidate critical journalism.”

In March, Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 20 journalists in Kurdistan covering the protests and found that security forces and their proxies routinely repress journalists through threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and by confiscating and destroying their equipment.

And Iraqi authorities appear to be pulling no punches. Zana Ali Ghazi, 32, a reporter for the Kurdistan News Network (KNN), a satellite television channel affiliated with the Kurdish opposition party, Goran, said that while he was trying to report on a protest in the city of Saeed Sadiq on March 15, “eight armed men, some in uniform, cracked three of his ribs and beat him with wooden clubs and Kalashnikovs until he lost consciousness. ‘They told me that if I continued to cover this type of news, they would kill me’,” Ghazi told HRW.

Kurdistan authorities have repeatedly tried to silence Livin Magazine, one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s leading independent publications, and other media. The international community should end its silence and condemn these widening
attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

A Livin reporter told Human Rights Watch that when he called the Minister of Peshmerga (Kurdistan security forces), on April 24, the minister threatened Livin’s editor, Mira, with death. The reporter says the conversation is on tape but that no one from the Iraqi authorities had made any move to investigate.

In Sulaimaniya on the night of May 11, security forces detained and beat a Kurdistan News Network reporter, Bryar Namiq, breaking his hand.

In Arbil, two journalists, who HRW says are afraid to be named for fear of reprisal, charged that on May 18 eight men in civilian clothes chased after them in late April. The men appeared in two vehicles on the street just before the journalists were supposed to meet with a regional official who had asked for a meeting with some members of the media.

HRW says the journalists believe that the men were plainclothes security forces who were aware of the meeting and were trying to kidnap them.

The HRW Report says that Soran Umar, a protest organizer and freelance journalist, has been in hiding since April 19. “I have not slept at home since then,” he told Human Rights Watch on May 17. “My sin is that I am criticizing the undemocratic acts of KRG and the two ruling parties, that is all. The security forces have tried to kidnap me, and they have ordered my arrest. They even tried to kidnap my son.”

These examples appear to be a small fraction of abuses carried out by Iraqi government authorities against journalists — Reporters Without Borders has tallied 44 physical attacks against media workers and outlets and 23 arrests.

Which prompted this thought from HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson: “Eight years after the United States removed Saddam Hussein in the name of protecting the rights of Kurds, it is standing by silently as the government it helped to install in Kurdistan abuses and represses the population. US President Obama noted in his speech on May 20 the flourishing democracy in Iraq, but the reality is that government-sponsored fear and repression continue to fester there.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Baltazar Garzón. Photo/Wikimedia

The Spanish Judge whose work triggered the investigation that nabbed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet back in 1998 believes that Spain could bring charges against six Bush Jr. administration officials for clearing the way for the use of torture during the Iraq war – but he is being blocked by charges making him the culprit.

On 17 January 2012, Al Jazeera reported that Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon had “gone on trial in the country’s Supreme Court on [three separate] charges of abusing judicial powers.”

According to West Chester University history professor Lawrence Davidson, Spanish and US authorities want even the remotest possibility of charges against Bush Administration officials to go away – quietly. To this end Spain is attempting to silence “a very important truth-teller (who has) conducted a number of investigations into violations of international law against torture.”

The truth-teller is Baltasar Garzón Real, 57, the Spanish jurist who in 1998 obtained a request for the extradition from the UK of former Chilean president, General, Augusto Pinochet, for the alleged deaths and torture of Spanish citizens. The former dictator was undergoing medical treatment in London.

Garzón was indicted in April 2010 for exceeding his authority when investigating crimes committed by the Franco regime that were included in an amnesty, and suspended on 14 May 2010, pending trial. He has been given permission to work as a consultant at the International Criminal Court.

Garzon used the principle of universal jurisdiction to go after Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet back in 1998, and said in March 2009 that Spain could now use the same principle to bring charges against Bush Jr. officials.

He charged that, “At least four men who are Spanish citizens, and also former prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison, have accused the U.S. military of torturing them.”

It was at this point, Davidson claims, that the U .S. government appears to have placed Garzon in a category that would also include Wikileaks case figures, (Pfc. Bradley) Manning and impresario Julian) Assange – “the category of the dangerous truth-teller.”

Davidson notes that the U.S. Ambassador to Spain in 2009, Eduardo Aguirre, describes his actions (in a diplomatic cable made public by Wikileaks in 2010) in relation to the Garzon investigation as follows, “…behind the scenes we have fought tooth and nail to make the charges disappear.”

Davidson says the significant word here is “disappear” for “there are two approaches to suppressing an unwanted truth. The first is to create a counter-story that makes the truth appear untrue. The second is to simply suppress all evidence, all references, all interest so that the particular truth just ‘disappears’.”

He declares that the U.S. ambassador, Eduardo Aguirre, “managed to get the cooperation of Spain’s Chief Prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza, who is quoted in another U.S. diplomatic cable (also made public by Wikileaks) to the effect that he had a plan to ‘embarrass’ Garzon into dropping his case against the Bush officials by misrepresenting Garzon’s actions in previous cases. This sounds like a bit of blackmail.”

However, he adds, Garzon did not relent and now he is on trial for “abusing judicial powers” in this and other cases.

Garzon and his supporters, which include almost every human rights group on the planet, claim that the charges are politically motivated and, “to be sure, the entire affair appears similar to the questionable rape charge facing Assange in Sweden.”

Davidson documents that the U.S. Ambassador to Spain in 2009, Eduardo Aguirre, described his actions (in a diplomatic cable made public by Wikileaks in 2010) in relation to the Garzon investigation. He wrote:

“…behind the scenes we have fought tooth and nail to make the charges disappear.” The significant word here is “disappear” for there are two approaches to suppressing an unwanted truth. The first is to create a counter-story that makes the truth appear untrue. The second is to simply suppress all evidence, all references, all interest so that the particular truth just “disappears.”

Davidson says, “This is precisely the outcome the U.S. government would like to see.”

He notes that Aguirre managed to get the cooperation of Spain’s Chief Prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who is quoted in another U.S. diplomatic cable (also made public by Wikileaks), to the effect that he had a plan to “embarrass” Garzon into dropping his case against the Bush officials by misrepresenting Garzon’s actions in previous cases. “This sounds like a bit of blackmail,” Davidson says.

He adds that Garzon did not relent and now he is on trial for “abusing judicial powers” in this and other cases.

“Garzon and his supporters, which include almost every human rights group on the planet, claim that the charges are politically motivated and, to be sure, the entire affair appears similar to the questionable rape charge facing Assange in Sweden,”  Davidson charges.

In the case of Garzon, the Spanish Public Prosecutor (different than the Chief Prosecutor) has recommended acquittal on all three charges and yet there is still serious doubt that this will happen. If he is found guilty on any of the charges, Garzon “could be banned from serving as a judge for 20 years, in what would be a career-ending blow.”

Davidson says, “This is precisely the outcome the U.S. government would like to see.”

The good news is that this battle to silence Garzon” has not yet intimidated all other Spanish judges.” On January 20, another Spanish judge , Pablo Rafael Gutierrez, took up the case of the former Spanish citizens who allege torture at Guantanamo Bay. This judge, again used the principle of universal jurisdiction, and noted that the United States government has consistently refused to investigate the Spanish citizen’s charges.

James Goldston, the executive director of Open Society Justice Initiative, described the situation this way, “These crimes [such as torture] are universal crimes and it is very clear that until the United States holds to account those responsible for these crimes, other judicial actors in other countries are going to press for accountability.”

Davidson concurs. He says, “The most powerful and influential government in the world, the one with its capital in Washington, D.C., is going to fight to halt these foreign efforts. And so, we have a war that seeks to replace the truth with either lies or historical black holes.”

“One of the major themes of George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, is the control of information…if government can control all media and all public records it can either impose a lie as truth or simply make selected past events disappear from society’s collective memory,” Davidson recalls.

“Who controls the past…controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Is this not what the United States government is trying to do in the case of its policy of torture: manipulate and hide the truth so people will ignore it and then forget it? And is this not what almost every country tries to do relative to their present crimes or those embedded in their pasts?

Davidson finds it “really amazing just how common this sort of manipulation is. And, the reason it is relatively easy for governments to get away with it is because the average man and woman cares mainly about little truths and not big ones.”

He continues: “Little truths are local truths. Don’t be misled to think that little means unimportant because that is not the case. Little truths are the truths that make possible successful daily interactions and that, of course, makes them very important indeed. Thus, one major reason life can go on relatively smoothly is that, most of the time, you can take as true what others tell you. That this is so means we can rely on friends, have stable relationships with spouses and children, and maintain successfully operating offices, business arrangements, etc. When the little truths start to become lies, these relationships break down.”

And finally, “Alleged big truths are the ones governments and the major media outlets tell the masses. When the U.S. government tells its citizens that unregulated capitalism will make the nation strong and prosperous, or that there must be a war to prevent Iraq from using weapons of mass destruction; when the major American media outlets tell their viewers and readers that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons or Israel is ‘just like us’,” they are shaping perceptions that are not just local but regional and national. The problem is that, historically, most alleged big truths turn out to be big lies.”

He concludes: “Yet truth-tellers, like Manning, Assange and Garzon have good historical memories and they do notice and do care. They realize that when big truths turn out to be big lies people suffer–they suffer in the millions, bombs range down from the skies, economies falter and the public sphere of life becomes like a poisoned well. That is why accountability for the crimes hidden behind big lies is so important. That is why no government, no politician, no media organization should be allowed to manipulate the truth about the past or the present. On this the future depends.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.