India’s Border Security Force remains on high alert after a two-day mutiny by the Bangladesh Rifles left scores dead. Unconfirmed reports in the Indian press link the mutiny to Pakistani intelligence.
A young Tibetan monk was shot by Chinese police after he set himself on fire on the third day of the Tibetan New Year, at a market in Sichuan province’s Ngaba prefecture. It is not known if he is alive or dead.
Suspected al-Qaeda operative Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is to be tried in US federal court, following the unsealing of an indictment. Al-Marri’s habeas corpus petition is pending before the Supreme Court.
Resource Wars on Venezuela’s Indigenous Frontier
from El Mundo/Libertario, Caracas
The information glut regarding the February referendum on Venezuela’s Constitutional amendment has hidden serious events happening in the state of Zulia, in particular the Sierra de Perijá along the Colombian border—pointing to a dangerous situation for the indigenous Yukpa people due to their attempt to recover their land.
Landowners in the cattle business have been taking lands that they know are the historical property of the Wayúu, Barí and Yukpa peoples. The latter took action in 2008, occupying several haciendas to recover what was theirs; the state reacted by promising to pay the ranchers the value of the occupied lands as a way to compromise.
However, these payments haven’t been made and due to the decrease in oil revenues it is doubtful they will be made. Because of that, the ranchers have been applying pressure on the natives to expel them from the recovered haciendas. There are armed thugs everywhere and the Bolivarian National Guard (militarized police under the command of the central government) have attacked and intimidated those who support the indigenous cause—a situation that also affects those who perform transportation services into the area, who are now afraid to do so.
Yukpa chief Sabino Romero Izarra is in danger as threats rain on his head, and we fear action by the paid assassins who a couple of years ago assassinated his 100-year-old father. Human rights organizations such as Homo et Natura—led by well known anthropologist Lusbi Portillo—and the Network to Support Peace and Justice have mobilized. They have filed complained in the courts—but have obtained a very timid measure of protection because the DISIP (Intelligence and Prevention Services Directorate, the political police) are in charge of enforcement, and only show up occasionally in the area.
The state has acted as accomplice in this terrible situation. Its position is no accident in an area where you can find Colombian FARC and ELN guerrillas, those displaced from Colombia who also impinge on the rights of the natives to their lands, and finally transnational mining companies from Ireland, Brazil, Spain and Chile who have the government’s blessing to extract coal in the most unhealthful and environmentally harmful way.
It is necessary to make this problem known to national and international public opinion to put a stop to the escalation by the landowners who, in their position of strength and with the complicity of the state, seek to overwhelm the weaker sector. We likewise denounce the fact that indigenous rights and environmental activists are prohibited from traveling in the area due to the de facto state of siege imposed by the “revolutionary and Bolivarian” armed forces.
While officialdom and the electoral opposition alike tear their clothes in a stupid campaign where one can only hear slogans for or against the indefinite presidential re-election with no in-depth discussion and shrouded in the cheapest legalese, these depressing events are taking place—revealing the praxis of an authoritarian political model attenuated by oil revenue in which militarism runs rampant.
These are expressions of state terrorism with a clear trajectory that goes from the “disappearances” in the operational theaters of the ’60s by graduates of the School of the Americas, to the Caracazo genocide [1989 riots in Caracas, brutally put down by the security forces of President Carlos Andrés Pérez] and the massacres of Yumare, Cantaura, El Amparo, the “Amparitos” Llano Alto and Paragua [villages near the Colombian border in Apure state, where peasants and fishermen were killed by the army in 1988]. It is now happening in the Sierra de Perijá and the victims are the people trampled on by multinational corporations, ranchers and displaced people. It all happens during the mandate of a government and a legislature that presumably rules to the benefit of native people.
—-
This article was originally published Jan. 30 in El Mundo, a Caracas daily. It was written by the editorial collective of the Venezuelan anarchist journal El Libertario, who provided an English translation. It was slightly edited by World War 4 Report.
See also:
WILL BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION END COAL MINING IN VENEZUELA?
by James Suggett, VenezuelAnalysis
World War 4 Report, July 2008
VENEZUELA’S CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM:
A Threat to What Was Won Through Struggle
from El Libertario, Caracas
World War 4 Report, December 2007
From our Daily Report:
Venezuela: term limits voted down in key win for Chávez
World War 4 Report, Feb. 16, 2009
Venezuela to militarize Colombian border
World War 4 Report, Nov. 10, 2008
——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution
Hemispheric Militarization in “Free Trade” Guise
by Laura Carlsen, CIP Americas Program
When the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was negotiated and signed in the early 90s, few people were thinking about its security implications. Environmentalists objected, fearing a corporate race to exploit natural resources and produce industrial wastes where environmental regulation and enforcement was weakest. Labor objected, arguing that companies would move jobs to where organized labor and workers’ rights were most vulnerable. There was vague talk about improving trinational relations and promoting joint foreign policy agendas, but the goal of a broader North American alliance remained formally off the table in order to steer the agreement through a reluctant US Congress.
The resulting pact was called a trade agreement, but is really a trade and investment agreement with significant changes in other areas important to transnational business, including expanded intellectual property protections. It was not until after the Bush administration came into power and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 provided the rationale for adoption of the Bush National Security Doctrine that security issues took center stage in the regional integration model.
In March 2005, the leaders of the three countries met in Waco, Texas, and agreed to form the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). The agreement was a “Washington-led” initiative, according to the US SPP website, which describes its founding principle like this: “The SPP is based on the principle that our prosperity is dependent on our security and recognizes that our three great nations share a belief in freedom, economic opportunity, and strong democratic institutions.”
In practice, the deep imbalance of power between the three nations has meant that the SPP was designed and implemented to bring the other two partners into the Bush counterterrorism paradigm. Although this paradigm had been widely repudiated by other nations in the world for its justification of unilateral action, preemptive strikes, executive power, and restriction of civil liberties—and particularly for the unpopular invasion of Iraq—Canada and Mexico by this time had developed such strong dependence on the US market that they were obliged to adopt the SPP.
The SPP does not have a text that can be reviewed or a unitary set of goals and objectives. Nor was it subject to parliamentary approval or oversight. This was intentional. After the battle to pass NAFTA in the US Congress and amid growing criticism of the agreement in all three countries, the governments wanted to avoid opening up a public debate on the issues. The information available on the SPP comes from what the executive branches choose to reveal on PR-oriented websites and in declarations that obscure as much as they reveal. The alarming way that NAFTA expanded its reach without public or even legislative agreement, as well as the secrecy of SPP proceedings, have been the principle sources of concern over the initiative.
The Bush National Security Doctrine of 2002 is a radical departure from previous formal precepts, if not practices, and the most grandiose expression of US hegemony since the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine explicitly links trade and security as two pillars of a vision that posit that what is good for the United States (as defined by the Bush administration and neoconservative architects of the plan) is good for the world. Although better known for formulating the change from containment to regime change, the document dedicates an entire chapter to asserting a fundamental relationship between free markets and US national security. Chapter VI, entitled “Ignite a New Era of Global Economic Growth through Free Markets and Free Trade” begins by assuming a causal chain between the free trade model, economic growth and prosperity, and national security.
It is therefore not surprising that NAFTA, the pioneer US-style trade agreement, also became the first FTA to be officially expanded into security. The goals are twofold: to apply the Bush counterterrorism model throughout North America and bring Canadian and Mexican national security apparatus under closer US control and surveillance, and to protect investment and business throughout the region. Under-Secretary of State Thomas Shannon put it succinctly when he said that the SPP “understands North America as a shared economic space,” one that “we need to protect.” He added: “To a certain extent, we’re armoring NAFTA.”
In brief, the SPP consists of working groups in various areas that produce recommendations to the governments. These are not released to the public, generally speaking, and are either adopted behind the scenes as rule changes or sent up as legislation with no sign of their SPP origins. The working groups are made up of government officials and business representatives. The North American Competitiveness Council was formed within the SPP of executives of the region’s largest and most powerful transnational corporations to make sure that the extension of NAFTA was guided by their interests and their interests alone.
Although the governments have issued numerous statements affirming that security and prosperity go together like love and marriage, NAFTA’s “natural” expansion of reach into the SPP has brought about a series of unnatural contradictions. Because the SPP includes no representation of labor, environmental, or citizen groups, these groups are often the ones whose rights and interests are violated by the proceedings of NAFTA-SPP. The SPP orientation to business and Bush geopolitical aims has compounded rather than resolved the worst contradictions of NAFTA.
Two examples suffice to illustrate the point: while NAFTA-SPP steadfastly refuses to deal with increased immigration as an issue of regional integration, the security section criminalizes the victims of the prosperity section. In other words, migrants driven from their livelihoods by the loss of their own local and national markets to imports are defined as international threats and subject to a series of enforcement-only measures under the SPP security section. This includes what are, in essence, preemptive strikes against Central American immigrants before they even near the US border. For this task, the US government has deputized the Mexican government, which had previously had a liberal view toward Central American refugees and immigrants, and given it millions of dollars worth of intelligence and military equipment to crack down on “human smuggling networks.”
Another example of the double standard inherent in the SPP regarding the treatment of goods and people is what might be called the “No Fly on the Open Skies” policy toward Canada. Under its list of achievements, the SPP lists, “The United States and Canada reached a full Open-Skies aviation agreement, removing all economic restrictions on air service to, from, and beyond one another’s territory by the airlines of both countries. The agreement will encourage new markets’ development, lower prices, and greater competition.” What is not mentioned in the great achievements section is that the US government has also enforced a “no fly” policy on Canada that restricts air travel of a long list, including activists, individuals with Arab names similar to suspects, and others. It has also raised grave issues of sovereignty and caused many to question whether security as defined under the SPP is really a lasting security for our three countries.
Perhaps the best example of where the SPP leads us is Plan Mexico. Originally, US promoters predicted that regional economic integration under NAFTA would work toward resolving other binational issues, including security issues. In the words of President Bush Sr. in 1991, “By boosting economic prosperity in Mexico, Canada, and the United States, it will help us move forward on issues that concern all of us. Issues such as drugs and education, immigration, and the environment.”
We now know that the reverse occurred. For complex reasons not all attributable to NAFTA of course, North America now faces security threats unimagined in 1991. In Mexico, since the launching of the war on drugs by incoming President Felipe Calderón in January of 2007, the nation has seen an explosion of drug-related violence. No one would argue that the problem of organized crime in Mexico is not real and has not reached alarming proportions. Within the SPP, negotiations began to design a US military aid package that resulted in the “Mérida Initiative,” officially described as a “regional security cooperation initiative.”
The Merida Initiative, more commonly known as “Plan Mexico” for its close similarities to Plan Colombia—the other major military aid package of the US government in the hemisphere—provides an example of the direction of the security element of NAFTA since, unlike other SPP measures, its basic outlines are at least known. Plan Mexico required authorization from the US Congress for appropriation of $400 million to Mexico.
Although obtaining detailed information about the plan has been far more difficult than it should be, given that it is a taxpayer-funded initiative, we do know that it closely follows the script of extending US military and intelligence presence in NAFTA partner territory. Plan Mexico funds military equipment and training for the Mexican army to the tune of $116 million. This includes surveillance planes and helicopters. Although the plan does not include troop presence—a political flash-point in Mexican society—it does increase the use of US trainers, mercenary groups, or private security companies, and members of other agencies such as the DEA and Tobacco and Firearms Control.
The plan was presented by President Bush in October of 2007 as a $1.4 billion, multi-year security cooperation initiative with Mexico and Central America to combat the threats of drug trafficking, transnational crime, and terrorism that undermine security not only in these countries, but also in the United States. Approved by the US Congress last year, the Mérida Initiative will, in the words of a State Department summary, “build a new strategic partnership with Mexico and the Central America countries; bolster homeland security by impeding the flow of transnational criminal activity and strengthening state institutions in Mexico and Central America; and increase the prospects of breaking down criminal organizations by building on successes of the Mexican government in the past year, including increased extraditions, police restructuring and legal reforms, and recent very large cocaine seizures.”
The phrase “impeding the flow of transnational criminal activity” indicates the underlying logic of the plan. Despite the hype, it is not really a binational cooperation initiative. There are no obligations for the United States regarding criminal activities in its own territory, notably gun-running, illegal drug trafficking, or money laundering. Criminal activity is portrayed as a contagion that spreads south to north.
This image deflects attention from the dismal failure of the United States in controlling its own illegal drug use and sales, and justifies US intervention in Mexico’s national security apparatus to an unprecedented degree.
The US government will now be responsible for designing and monitoring centralized intelligence systems, military equipment, and training in the police, justice, and penal systems. This type of plan differs considerably from a model of cooperation, where police and military forces share best practices and Mexico is free to contract consultant services from regions of the world with a proven track record in fighting organized crime.
In addition, the militarized approach to fighting organized crime, couched in terms of the counterterrorism model of the Bush administration, presents serious threats to civil liberties and human rights. In Mexico, this has already been clear particularly among four vulnerable groups: members of political opposition, women, indigenous peoples, and migrants. Corresponding legislation pushed by the United States that adopts broad measures against “international terrorism” (virtually non-existent in Mexico) has led to a flurry of protests by human rights groups and legal experts. Because Mexico cannot receive any cash under Plan Mexico, the entire appropriations package translates into juicy contracts for arms manufacturers, mercenary firms, and US defense and intelligence agencies.
Perhaps the deepest criticism of the SPP-Plan Mexico model has to do with the concept of sovereignty. Some people have declared this concept obsolete in the era of globalization. And yet it remains fundamental to international relations simply because nations are the entities involved. No matter how economically integrated, North America is a region of three nations that share values but have very different geopolitical and human security priorities. In defining their security agendas, they should not forge a common identity under the hammer of the strongest, but seek mechanisms of cooperation for the well-being of all their people.
It may seem ironic to refer to “NAFTA’s dangerous security agenda.” Security, after all, aims to keep people safe. Yet under the SPP, with the exception of health epidemics and food safety measures, most of the work has been oriented toward guarding infrastructure and business, and focusing on military approaches to crime rather than looking to root causes such as poverty and marginalization—in many cases by-products of NAFTA itself. This enforcement approach is dangerous because it does not work, and it militarizes society.
In sum, the SPP has opened the door to secretive and dangerous negotiations on both economic integration and security issues. All of these discussions must be taken to the public in all three countries. To do that, we must subject NAFTA and the SPP to a complete overhaul.
In the case of the SPP, the entire structure was adopted and expanded without public or congressional consent and should be abolished. A review by Congress can determine which working groups should continue under the framework of NAFTA and how their composition can be changed to reflect the real and diverse interests of society. The same should be done in the other countries, as well.
—-
Laura Carlsen is director of the Center for International Policy’s Americas Program in Mexico.
This story first appeared Jan. 23 on the website of the CIP Americas Program.
RESOURCES
Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America
http://www.spp.gov/
North American Competitiveness Council
http://www.aaccla.org/issues/index/international/nacc.htm
National Security Doctrine of 2002
http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:M8QJP6a…
See also:
THE NORTH AMERICAN UNION FARCE
Right-Wing Paranoia Misses the Real Threat of NAFTA’s Militarization
by Laura Carlsen, IRC Americas Program
World War 4 Report, April 2008
From our Daily Report:
NAFTA boosted Mexican immigration: study
World War 4 Report, Jan. 25, 2009
US releases first tranche of Plan Mexico funds
World War 4 Report, Dec. 5, 2008
NAFTA partners extend SPP at “Three Amigos” summit
World War 4 Report, April 24, 2008
——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution
Thousands of “Enemy Combatants” Held in Global Gulag
by Matt Vogel, Catholic Worker
Jan. 11, 2009 began the eighth year of operation for the prisons at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In the past few months, Guantánamo has been much in the news, with Barack Obama’s promise to close it down. Many people around the world hope that President Obama will indeed shut down this terrible symbol of torture and abuse, and are working to hold him to this promise.
Peering into the moral and legal black hole that is Guantánamo, however, one quickly sees that Guantánamo’s 270 or so prisoners are but the tip of the iceberg; the US is and has been holding thousands more prisoners around the world as “enemy combatants” in the course of the Global War on Terror. Human rights and anti-death penalty lawyer Clive Stafford Smith reported in early December 2008 that the US is holding 27,000 other prisoners in prisons worldwide. Like Guantánamo early on, very little is known about these prisons or the people they house, and that should worry us. The US system of detention in this war truly is a global gulag.
Many of the prisoners are held in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bagram Air Base, the center of US operations in Afghanistan, is one of the most infamous US prisons anywhere. At least since 2005, with reports of the deaths of two men in custody at Bagram in 2002, allegations of abuse and torture have swirled around the prison. Several prisoners at Guantánamo, who had previously been held at Bagram, say Bagram is worse. (The US says it stopped transferring prisoners from Bagram to Guantánamo in 2004). But, unlike Guantánamo, there are no plans to close Bagram. In May 2008, the Pentagon announced plans to replace the current prison at Bagram with a $60 million, 40-acre prison housing up to 1,100 prisoners, suggesting that the current prison, housing roughly 625 prisoners, is simply not big enough. Additionally, the US government wants to beef up the intelligence staff at the prison, asking for more interrogators and analysts, according to a September 2008 report in USA Today.
In June 2008, the Afghan Human Rights Organization reported that ten children between the ages of nine and thirteen were being held at Bagram, and, in its May 2008 report to the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child, the US acknowledged that children were being held in Bagram, though the Pentagon has repeatedly denied that anyone under 16 is in custody there. As if all of this didn’t mirror Guantánamo enough, a 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, which does have access to the prisoners at Bagram) report is said to claim horrible conditions at the prison, including overcrowding, prisoners being held incommunicado, prisoners held without charge or lawyers for over five years, some prisoners hidden away from even the ICRC itself and cruel treatment violating the Geneva Conventions. In responding to the report, the Pentagon said that the ICRC had access to all Department of Defense prisoners at Bagram, raising a serious question, as similar language did in Guantánamo: are other agencies (like the CIA) holding prisoners at Bagram?
The two major US-run prisons in Iraq are Camp Bucca in southern Iraq near the Kuwaiti border (reportedly with a capacity of 30,000) and Camp Cropper near Baghdad (with a capacity of roughly 4,000). Together, these two hold the vast majority of the 27,000 prisoners to which Stafford Smith referred. The US military reports that it holds, as of this writing, roughly 15,800 prisoners in Iraq. While the recent Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Iraqi governments at least in theory ends the US military’s ability to arrest and hold prisoners in Iraq, with the Iraqi institutions still so unstable, it is unclear how exactly those restrictions will be played out on the ground. Already, the US military has announced that some US troops will remain in Iraqi cities and towns after the summer of 2009, when the Status of Forces Agreement stipulates their withdrawal. Will the provisions regarding the prisoners be discarded as easily?
As of January 1, 2009, the US, according to the Status of Forces Agreement, was to transfer those prisoners believed to be dangerous to the Iraqis and release the rest. The Iraqis, lacking provisions for preventive detainment under Iraqi law, must either charge those prisoners transferred to them with a crime or release them. The US is to release prisoners “in a safe and orderly manner,” and, in December the plan was to release 1,500 prisoners each month until the prisons are emptied, with Feb. 1, 2009 as the first release date.
The military also claims that once there are 8,000 prisoners left in Camp Bucca, they will be transferred to a new prison being built in Taji, scheduled to begin operation in March 2009, and Camp Bucca will be closed. This Taji prison is planned to be turned over to Iraqi control in December 2009, nearly a year past the January 1, 2009 date the Status of Forces Agreement sets for an end to the arrest and detainment of captives by the US. The US military has not announced any plans to close Camp Cropper, the US detention system’s headquarters and main processing center in Iraq.
Even if the US were to follow the Status of Forces Agreement and either turn prisoners over to the Iraqi government or free them, the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s prisons receive a great deal of money from and are advised by the US—yet another successful US government imprisonment-by-proxy exercise, it appears. December reports placed the population of Iraqi prisons around 25,000. Conditions in these prisons are so bad that Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups are genuinely worried that prisoners will be transferred only to be tortured; a recent UN report cites “ongoing widespread ill-treatment and torture of detainees by Iraqi law enforcement authorities.”
Nevertheless, the US military is trying to find evidence of criminality for the roughly 5,000 prisoners it considers dangerous, prior to turning them over to the Iraqis. This underscores the fact that thousands of people have been held without access to courts or lawyers and without charge, many for years. Clive Stafford Smith reported in a May interview with Amy Goodman on the radio program Democracy Now! that the US is even bringing people into Iraq from other places, giving credence to the notion that the US is using its prisons in Iraq to keep people hidden away, just as it tried to do in Guantánamo.
The CIA, however, has a more effective way of hiding people—it uses secret prisons. Much has been written over the past several years about the CIA’s “black sites,” and President Bush confirmed their existence in 2006. However, the CIA has never stated that the program has ended, nor has it ever released any of the locations of its prisons, the number of prisoners, their names, or described the treatment they received. US officials have admitted that the CIA has used “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the Bush administration’s euphemism for torture), including waterboarding, in the past. Secret prisons are believed to be in or have been in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia, Djibouti, Thailand, Jordan, Morocco, Eastern Europe (including at least Poland and Romania) and Guantánamo. Moreover, in March 2008, the BBC reported the story of a Yemeni man who claimed he was held in secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe and was tortured as late as 2006. Years after the existence of these black sites was uncovered, we are still far from the whole truth.
Closely tied to the CIA’s black sites is the extraordinary rendition program, by which the US government kidnaps people and “renders” them to a third country for interrogation and often torture. Countries people report having been “rendered” to include Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Uzbekistan, all with worrisome human rights records. Stafford Smith’s organization, Reprieve, claims, in a report released in June 2008, that there have been at least 200 or so renditions since 2006 when President Bush claimed the program ended. A congressional report cited in a June 2008 article in The Guardian claims that at least 14,000 people may have been subjected to rendition and secret imprisonment since 2001. With these programs still shrouded in secrecy, it is impossible to know exactly how many people the CIA is holding (or holding by proxy) throughout the world—and whether or not they‘re still being tortured.
It seems that a key component of the rendition program is US military ships. Reprieve’s June 2008 report claims that the US has used at least seventeen ships as prisons since 2001. Often, prisoners were brought to these ships for interrogation and then “rendered” elsewhere. The US has admitted to using the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu as prisons, and Reprieve believes the USS Ashland and other ships stationed off Somalia in the Gulf of Aden have also been key prisons in the War on Terror. What could be more isolated or secret than a prison floating in the middle of an ocean?
Reprieve’s report also cites fifteen other ships it believes should be investigated, given their presence in the Indian Ocean around the island of Diego Garcia. Located about 1,000 miles south of India, Diego Garcia is the largest of a sixty-five-island archipelago known as the Chagos Islands. A tiny island, thirty-seven miles long, with only twelve square miles of land, Diego Garcia is a British territory leased to the US since 1971 for use as a military base (after the 2,000 inhabitants were removed). It has been a key staging area for both the first and second Iraq wars and is thought to have been home to a secret CIA prison from 2002 until at least 2006. In fact, Reprieve believes that most of the “high-value” prisoners were “rendered” through or were held in Diego Garcia, on British soil. Despite the fact that a senior US official admitted the existence of the CIA’s prison on Diego Garcia to Time magazine in August 2008, officially, the US and Britain deny such claims. The revelation of the existence of a CIA prison on Diego Garcia not only illustrates the truly global nature of the US system of indefinite detention, it highlights its deliberate secrecy.
The US military estimates that, since 2001, in the course of the War on Terror, it alone has detained over 80,000 people. Those prisoners and those held by other US agencies have found themselves in different prisons all over the world, but all have been held without trial, charges or access to lawyers, hidden away from the outside world, and many prisoners faced torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment. Scores of people have fought to bring light into Guantánamo, to open it to the courts and the press, to humanitarian oversight and legal representation. But as the years wear on, we learn more and more that this makes Guantánamo an exception to this clandestine world-wide prison operation. Thousands upon thousands languish unheard of in these other prisons, and as we press President Obama to shut down Guantánamo, we cannot forget the rest of those the US has disappeared.
—-
This story originally appeared in the January-February 2009 issue The Catholic Worker, newspaper of the New York City branch of the Catholic Worker movement, 36 East 1st St., New York, NY 10003
RESOURCES
Reprieve
http://www.reprieve.org.uk
Witness Against Torture 100 Days Campaign
http://www.100dayscampaign.org/
Afghanistan Human Rights Organization
http://www.ahro.af/
“Bagram: Worse Than Guantanamo?” IPS, Jan. 12, 2009
“UN: Human Rights Abuses in Iraq Still Widespread,” VOA, Dec. 2, 2008
“Pentagon To Expand Intel Ops at US Prison in Afghanistan,” USA Today, Sept. 16, 2008, online at Common Dreams
“Source: US Used UK Isle for Interrogations,” Time, July 31, 2008
“US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships,” The Guardian, June 2, 2008
“Yemeni describes CIA secret jails,” BBC News, March 14, 2008
“Clive Stafford Smith: US Holding 27,000 in Secret Overseas Prisons,” Democracy Now! May 19, 2008
See also:
WAR ON TRUTH AT GUANTANAMO
Detainees Launch Non-Violent Resistance Behind Pentagon’s Iron Veil
by Tanya Theriault, Catholic Worker
World War 4 Report, December 2005
From our Daily Report:
Obama: no rights for Afghan detainees
World War 4 Report, Feb. 22, 2009
New evidence of DoD cooperation with CIA “ghost detention” program
World War 4 Report, Feb. 18, 2009
Secret CIA gulag: Bush admits it
World War 4 Report, Sept. 7, 2006
Iraq detainees: US troops threw us to lions (on Camp Bucca)
World War 4 Report, Nov. 16, 2005
Testimony claims secret CIA archipelago
World War 4 Report, Aug. 7, 2005
Pentagon maintains secret floating prisons?
World War 4 Report, July 2, 2005
War crimes charges for Rumsfeld, Bush? (on Camp Cropper)
World War 4 Report, May 29, 2005
From our archive:
Report: CIA using harsh interrogation technqiues (on Bagram torture case)
World War 4 Report, Dec. 30, 2002
——————-
Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution
Venezuela and Bolivia condemned US State Department reports on human rights and narcotics that single out the two South American countries, saying Washington has no right to pass judgment.
