Australian Troops Carry Out
Provocations Against East Timor’s Fretilin

Richard Phillips
27 August 2007


Australian troops occupying East Timor vandalised and stole Fretilin flags from two villages in the country’s eastern districts of Baucau and Viqueque last week. The arrogant and crude provocation is part of the Australian government’s ongoing attempts to intimidate opponents of the recent appointment of Xanana Gusmao as East Timorese prime minister.

According to eyewitnesses, soldiers travelling in two Australian military vehicles on August 18 pulled down flags outside Walili, wiped their backsides with them and then drove off with the torn material. At Alala, in the Viqueque district, troops tried to pull a Fretilin flag away from its rope, dragged it onto the road and then drove over it.

Fretilin supporters were flying the flags in protest against the new government, which was appointed on August 6 by East Timorese President Jose Ramos-Horta after obvious prompting from Canberra. Gusmao heads an anti-Fretilin coalition government, despite the fact that Fretilin won 29 percent of the popular vote in the June 30 election and is the largest party bloc in the 65-member parliament.

The flag desecrations were immediately condemned by Fretilin vice president Arsenio Bano and Fretilin president and former prime minister Mari Alkatiri.

Bano correctly noted that the actions were not just carried out by “misguided individual soldiers” but were “another demonstration of the partisan nature of the Howard government’s military intervention in East Timor.” It reflected, he continued, the “cultural insensitivity and arrogance that typifies Australian military operations in the Pacific region.”

Alkatiri said that the Australian troops had been intimidating Fretilin supporters for an extended period. “They [Australian troops] came here to help us solve our problems but they came to give their backing to one side and fight against the other. They had better return home because they are not neutral,” he said.

Alkatiri’s claim that the Australian troops had come “to help us solve our problems” is patently false. The Fretilin leader himself was forced to resign as prime minister last year after a dirty tricks campaign orchestrated by Canberra and the Australian media. During his last visit to East Timor in July, Prime Minister John Howard arrogantly declared that Australian troops would remain in the country until there was “stability”.

From the outset, Australia’s intervention in the poverty stricken country has been a neo-colonial operation aimed at securing the largest share of the oil and gas resources in the Timor Gap, while preventing other regional powers from exercising influence.

Alkatiri’s tentative suggestion that the military should “return home”—the first time a Fretilin leader has publicly called for the withdrawal of Australian troops—is a pale reflection of the popular opposition to the open-ended Australian occupation.

Growing numbers of East Timorese people are hostile to Canberra’s meddling and its increasingly aggressive ultimatums. The protests that erupted following the appointment of Gusmao as prime minister were another indication of the extent of the anger, which Fretilin has attempted to both contain and use for its own immediate political ends.

When Ramos-Horta announced his appointment of Gusmao to head the government, Fretilin declared the new regime unconstitutional, threatened legal action and called for a parliamentary boycott by its MPs. Alkatiri suggested that “people power” might force Fretilin’s inclusion in a new “grand coalition”. But when the demonstrations condemning Gusmao and Ramos-Horta as Canberra’s puppets threatened to escalate out of control, the party leadership quickly moved to dissipate the widespread opposition.

After three days of protests and riots, in which scores of people were arrested, and refugee camps in Dili surrounded by Australian troops to prevent the residents from demonstrating, Alkatiri met with Ramos-Horta and Gusmao and pledged to calm the situation. Before the meeting, Ramos-Horta threatened to sack any civil servant who joined anti-government protests.

A week later, the Fretilin leadership dropped its threatened legal action against the government. The party’s leading personnel visited villages, telling local leaders that they would be held responsible for any violence. On August 13, Aniceto Lopes, leader of Fretilin’s parliamentary group, issued a statement appealing to party members and supporters to “guarantee stability” in the country and announced that MPs were ending their boycott.

As UN spokesperson Allison Cooper told SBS News: “We are very, very relieved and we welcome Fretilin’s decision to return into the parliament. They have a very valid and important role as the opposition and the opposition’s role in formulating policies and laws that will guide this country over the next five years...”

In other words, the Fretilin leadership is being relied upon to accept the anti-democratic appointment of an Australian-backed puppet regime, become its “loyal” parliamentary opposition, and collaborate with it in the continuing exploitation of the people and resources of East Timor.

Meanwhile, the Howard government’s provocations against Fretilin are continuing unabated.

In the eastern districts, Australian troops have reportedly been canvassing villages, telling residents they should stop supporting Fretilin and back the new government. Fernando Soares, a 35-year-old farmer and a well-known Fretilin member in Bucoli, said that at 8 p.m. on August 16, two days before the flag provocation, a group of Australian soldiers accompanied by a Timorese interpreter, came to his home and demanded to know whether he supported Fretilin or the Gusmao government.

When Soares said he supported Fretilin, he was told that he should back the new government and “influence” youth in his area to do the same. Other villagers have reported similar demands by Australian troop patrols over the past year. Fretilin’s response to this bullying has been to call for a Fretilin and United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor (UNMIT) investigation into Australian Defence Force operations.

Notwithstanding their differences with Gusmao and Ramos-Horta, the Fretilin leadership has no program to alleviate the mass poverty that afflicts the East Timorese people. Fretilin’s manoeuvres are directed toward demonstrating that it is the most effective political instrument for containing the East Timorese masses while appealing to one or another major power in Europe or Asia to counteract Australian domination.

http://wsws.org/articles/2007/aug2007/etim-a27.shtml

US Occupation Fuels Ethnic Cleansing
And Mass Repression In Iraq

By Patrick Martin
27 August 2007

Several reports on conditions in Iraq released last week confirm that the US troop surge in 2007 has accelerated the division of the Iraqi population along ethno-religious lines and dramatically increased the number of Iraqis held in barbaric conditions of imprisonment.

The Iraqi Red Crescent Organization reported that the number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, from 499,000 to 1.1 million, since the latest US troop buildup began in February. According to the New York Times, “the scale of this migration has put so much strain on Iraqi governmental and relief offices that some provinces have refused to register any more displaced people, or will accept only those whose families are originally from the area.”

The vast majority of the displaced are Sunnis driven out of Shiite-dominated areas or Shiites driven out of Sunni-dominated areas: victims of ethnic cleansing carried out on the basis of religious sect.

According to a summary of the Red Crescent data in the Times, “The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.”

The International Organization for Migration, an agency of the United Nations, found that the rate of displacement from Baghdad, the main target of stepped-up US military violence, has increased by a factor of 20, a rise so staggering that it seems the outcome of a deliberate US military policy of partitioning the Iraqi capital city. While Baghdad was once believed to have been divided roughly 60-40, with Sunnis in the majority, the current sectarian breakdown could be as much as 80-20 Shiite.

Violence, overwhelmingly along sectarian lines, was the leading cause of forced migration. The UN agency reported that, among Iraqi internal migrants who responded to a survey, 63 percent said they had fled neighborhoods because of direct threats to their lives. More than 25 percent said they had been forcibly expelled from their homes.

The third report came from the US military’s Task Force 134, which runs US detention operations in Iraq. It reported that since February the number of prisoners held by US and other foreign military forces has risen by 50 percent, from 16,000 in February to 24,500 now. Some 85 percent of those detained are Sunni Arabs, with the remainder mainly Shiites. Contrary to Bush administration propaganda, which portrays the armed resistance to US occupation as largely the work of foreign terrorists, only 280 of those detained are from outside Iraq, many of them citizens of states allied to the US, like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Both the Red Crescent and the UN migration office suggested that the increased tempo of US military operations was directly correlated with the rapid growth in forced migration. According to Dr. Said Hakki, director of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, 100,000 people a month have been fleeing their homes since the US “surge” began.

The US troop surge, in point of fact, has generated more internal flight and population shift than the explosion of Sunni-Shiite violence after the bombing of the Shiite mosque of the golden dome in Samarra in February 2006, an event frequently (but falsely) cited by the Bush administration as the starting point of sectarian violence.

The internal population movement after the US escalation that began in February is greater than any in Iraq’s previous three decades of bloody conflict: the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Kurdish uprising of 1987-88, the first Gulf War in 1990-91, the failed Kurdish and Shiite uprisings of 1991, and the US invasion and conquest in 2003.

The Times noted, “The demographic shifts could favor those who would like to see Iraq partitioned into three semi-autonomous regions: a Shiite south and a Kurdish north sandwiching a Sunni territory.” The US newspaper delicately avoided identifying those who support partition, but it includes not only Shiite and Kurdish sectarian leaders, but much of the US political and military establishment, including leading figures in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Such a policy of forced population transfer along sectarian and ethnic lines, using violence and intimidation to stampede those unwilling to move, is a war crime under the principles laid down at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. Charges of ethnic cleansing could be brought against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of the leadership of the Bush administration, as well as their accomplices in Congress and the officer corps following its orders.

One leading Democrat, Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has gone so far as to make the demand for partition of Iraq—i.e., advocacy of a war crime—a major element of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The longer the US occupation continues, the bloodier the crimes will become. The intensifying crisis of the stooge government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has recently led a number of US officials, military and civilian, to call on the Bush administration to drop its pretense of establishing “democracy” in Iraq and establish an open military dictatorship that will take even more brutal measures against the Iraqi population.

Brig. Gen. John Bednarek, one of the commanders of the Task Force Lightning offensive in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, told CNN Wednesday, “Democratic institutions are not necessarily the way ahead in the long-term future” of Iraq. The network cited this comment on its website, saying that “exasperated front-line U.S. generals talk openly of non-democratic governmental alternatives ...”

Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, commander of Task Force Lighting, said his goal was “an effective and functioning government that is really a partner with the United States and the rest of the world in this fight against the terrorists.” His soldiers were fighting for security, not democracy, he told CNN, “stating that democracy is merely an option that Iraqis are free to choose or reject.”

A leading House Republican, Congressman Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, echoed this sentiment Friday. In an appearance on local public television in Lansing, Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, declared, “The president has to be willing to say, ‘I’m going to take democracy off the table. We’re going to aim for safety and stability.’” Another Michigan Republican congressman, Mike Rogers, seconded Hoekstra’s sentiments, saying the US goal in Iraq should be “strategic victory” rather than democracy.

These developments underscore the falsity of the pro-war argument that is being increasingly raised by both the Bush administration and liberal apologists for the war—the claim that the United States must keep forces in Iraq, more or less indefinitely, to prevent a bloodbath among the civilian population.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, for instance, who has postured as a born-again opponent of the war he voted to authorize in 2002, declared that “the US must retain sufficient forces in the region to prevent a genocide.” Similar arguments have been made across the spectrum of the corporate-controlled media, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, as well as by the Bush White House.

The truth is that the bloodbath of civilians is taking place in Iraq right now, under the auspices of the US occupation. The longer the occupation continues, the greater the destruction of Iraqi society, and the greater the danger that the war will spread beyond the borders of Iraq to become a more general military conflagration.

The US invasion and conquest of Iraq is directly responsible for a death toll that will, long before Bush leaves office, exceed 1 million people. This war is one of the greatest crimes in history, and all those responsible for it must be held legally and criminally responsible.

http://wsws.org/articles/2007/aug2007/iraq-a27.shtml

British Army Deploys New Weapon
Based On Mass-killing Technology

John Byrne

A new 'super-weapon' being supplied to British soldiers in Afghanistan employs technology based on the "thermobaric" principle which uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs.

The so-called "enhanced blast" weapon uses similar technology used in the US "bunker busting" bombs and the devastating bombs dropped by the Russians to destroy the Chechen capital, Grozny.

Such weapons are brutally effective because they first disperse a gas or chemical agent which is lit at a second stage, allowing the blast to fill the spaces of a building or the crevices of a cave. When the US military deployed a version of these weapons in 2005, DefenseTech wrote an article titled, "Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon."

According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, "The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents."

A second DIA study said, "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue... it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."

"The effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense," said a CIA study of the weapons. "Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness."

British defense officials told the UK Guardian that British bombs were "different."

"They are optimized to create blast [rather than heat]", one said, speaking on the standard condition of anonymity in Britain. The official added that it would be misleading to call them "thermobaric."

Officials told the Guardian the new weapon was classified as a soldier launched "light anti-structure munition" and that the bombs would be more effective because "even when they hit the damage is limited to a confined area."

"The continuing issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has enormous importance in the battle for hearts and minds," said Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell in the article. "If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians then a primary purpose of the British deployment is going to be made yet more difficult."

According to Campbell, the deployment of the weapons was not announced to Parliament.

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/British_Army_deploys_new_weapon_based_0823.html
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=7056

New Provocation Against Tehran
Bush To Brand

Iranian Force As “Terrorist”

Peter Symonds

In a move with ominous implications, the Bush administration, according to articles in yesterday’s New York Times and Washington Post, has resolved to brand the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “specially designated global terrorist” organization. In doing so, Bush will use powers provided under a presidential order signed shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The highly provocative step not only sets the stage for intensified economic pressure on Tehran, but also formalises a potential casus belli for US military action against Iran.

The decision to unilaterally criminalise a major branch of the military of a sovereign nation is unprecedented. The IRGC, which was formed after the 1979 Iranian revolution, has an estimated 125,000 soldiers and other personnel in its land, sea and air forces.

The designation will place the IRGC in the same category as Al Qaeda, Lebanon’s Shiite militia Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups, all of which have been attacked either by the US military or its Israeli allies, and their members detained and tortured as “terrorist” suspects.

The pretext for the move is the unsubstantiated US claim that the IRGC is “interfering” in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporting “terrorist” groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Bush administration and Pentagon officials have been engaged in an escalating propaganda offensive in recent weeks claiming that the IRGC, in particular its elite Quds Force, has been arming, training and directing Shiite militias engaged in attacking US troops in Iraq. Washington further alleges that the IRGC has been assisting the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces in Afghanistan.

Even if one were to accept these allegations at face value, it is the height of hypocrisy for the gangsters of the Bush administration to brand a section of Tehran’s military as terrorist and proscribe it for “meddling” in Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries on its border that are occupied by US-led forces. The US military has killed thousands of Afghanis and reduced Iraq to ruins over the past five years. American occupation forces have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, forced millions to flee the country and devastated the physical and social infrastructure. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been rounded up, detained indefinitely without charge and tortured.

No one deserves the designation of “terrorist” more than the Bush administration, which has utilised its vast military superiority to terrorise the Afghan and Iraqi peoples in an effort to stamp out the legitimate opposition to neo-colonial occupation.

The US propaganda against Iran bears an eerie resemblance to the lies used to justify the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is a concoction of bald assertions, half-truths and outright falsehoods, all riddled with unexplained contradictions. No evidence has been provided to rebut Iran’s repeated denial of any involvement in supporting Shiite militias in Iraq. No attempt is made to explain why Iran would be arming the Taliban and other Sunni extremists, who regard all Shiites, and the Tehran regime in particular, as heretics to be wiped out.

Iran may very well be providing aid to anti-US Shiite forces in Iraq, but the Bush administration’s suggestions that Tehran is the mastermind behind the Iraqi resistance and is using it to wage a proxy war against America are patently absurd, as are the entirely contradictory claims that the Sunni extremist Al Qaeda is the main source of attacks on US occupation forces and their Iraqi allies. According to the twisted logic of American imperialism, any Iraqis who oppose US domination of their country are, by definition, “anti-Iraqi” agents of external terrorist forces.

While Iranian intelligence agents are undoubtedly active in Iraq, so too are Saudi, Jordanian and other intelligence agencies. Saudi citizens, not Iranians, account for the majority of suicide bombings in Iraq. And while demanding ever tougher sanctions against Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration has just concluded multi-billion dollar arms deals with Saudi Arabia, Israel and other Middle Eastern allies that can only trigger an arms race in the volatile region.

The immediate effect of branding the IRGC as “specially designated global terrorist” organisation is economic. Any organisation or individual knowingly providing material support to the IRGC would be subject to criminal charges. Any US bank that uncovered IRGC resources would be compelled to hand them over to the Treasury Department.

The main impact would not be inside the US, which has maintained an economic blockade of Iran since 1981 and designated the regime as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984, but against foreign corporations with any relations with the IRGC’s extensive business interests.

According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration is considering unveiling the measure at next month’s session of the UN General Assembly. The timing is calculated to maximise pressure on Russia, China and the European powers to agree to US demands for tough new economic sanctions against Iran.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had already reportedly told European countries that the unilateral measure was necessary due to the delay in a new UN resolution—the result of Chinese and Russian opposition. “Anyone doing business with these people will have to reevaluate their actions immediately,” one US official told the Washington Post. “It removes the excuses for doing business with these people.”

Military confrontation

The purpose of the US move, however, goes far beyond economically penalising Iran and America’s European and Asian rivals, which have huge economic interests at stake. A mad logic is propelling the Bush administration towards a military confrontation with Iran despite the quagmires in which the US military is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having set out through its previous invasions to establish its untrammelled domination over the Middle East and its energy resources, the Bush administration now finds that it has only strengthened Iranian influence in the region by removing two of Tehran’s chief rivals—Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and the Taliban in Kabul.

The IRGC’s “terrorist” designation is one more sign that the internal debate in the White House is shifting in favour of a military adventure against Iran despite its potentially disastrous consequences for US imperialism. Over the past year, Rice’s diplomatic efforts to pressure Iran to bow to US demands have appeared to predominate. But, as the New York Times noted, “in recent months, there has been resurgent debate within the administration about whether the diplomatic path is working, with aides to Vice President Dick Cheney said to be pushing for greater consideration of military operations.”

An article syndicated last week in McClatchy Newspapers reported: “Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching air strikes at suspected training camps in Iraq run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two US officials who are involved in Iran policy.” It added: “Cheney, who’s long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran’s complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq: for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.”

At his press conference last Thursday, President Bush bluntly threatened Iran, declaring: “When we catch you playing a non-constructive role, there will be a price to pay.” He also made clear that recent meetings in Baghdad between US and Iranian ambassadors did not involve negotiations, but were to present US ultimatums to Tehran. “One of the main reasons that I asked Ambassador Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq was to send the message that there will be consequences for... people transporting, delivering EFPs [roadside bombs]... that kill Americans in Iraq,” he said.

Bush publicly contradicted Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who was visiting Tehran at the time and described Iran’s role in the region as constructive. “Now, if the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don’t believe they are constructive,” he said.

Maliki, whose government is dominated by Shiite parties with longstanding ties to Iran, may well be one of the first casualties of Washington’s sharpening conflict with Tehran. His cabinet has suffered a series of damaging defections in recent months and, amid rumours of a no-confidence motion when parliament resumes next month, Bush has been less than fulsome in publicly supporting his “friend.”

Cheney’s reported call for strikes on IRGC bases inside Iran in the event of the discovery of “a truckload of fighters or weapons” crossing into Iraq recalls comments earlier this year by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, in which he mooted “a plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran.” In the midst of a scathing denunciation of Bush’s “war on terror” and its deleterious impact on US interests, Brzezinski suggested the following scenario: “Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the US blamed on Iran, culminating in a ‘defensive’ US military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Brzezinski, a man with contacts at the highest levels of the US state apparatus and his own experiences in organising provocations, knows whereof he speaks. It is not difficult to imagine any number of incidents—from the Iranian capture of US sailors to a devastating attack on a US military base—that could be exploited by the Bush administration to whip up an atmosphere of hysteria and jingoism for the purpose of initiating plans that are already in place for a military attack on Iran. In fact, the declaration of the IRGC as a “terrorist” organization, along with the Bush administration’s increasingly inflammatory language, is calculated to incite sections of the Iranian regime to provide just such a pretext.

The Democrats, far from opposing a new war against Iran, have already indicated that they would rapidly fall into line and rubberstamp American aggression. None of the Democratic contenders for the presidency have ruled out the use of military force against Iran.

Significantly, Tom Lantos, Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations, yesterday immediately welcomed the Bush administration’s move against the IRGC as the means for keeping Iran and its agencies “from destabilising global security.” While cautiously declaring that “we are far from exhausting all the peaceful options,” he went on to repeat the Bush administration’s litany of accusations against the IRGC, from its alleged involvement in nuclear weapons development to its alleged role in training “terrorists” in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. In the event of a military confrontation, all of the verbal caveats would quickly be torn up—just like the promises to withdraw US troops from Iraq.

With just over a year to the presidential elections, the Bush administration is under few restraints in aggressively pursuing its agenda—including a military attack on Iran as a desperate gamble to fulfill US ambitions to become the predominant power in the resource-rich region. All the signs indicate that it is not so much a question of if, but when US imperialism launches its next criminal war—this time against Iran.

See Also:

US military launches offensive against "Iranian-backed" militia in Iraq[16 August 2007]

US generals insist on no troop withdrawal from Iraq[9 August 2007]

Adding fuel to the Mideast fire: US unveils huge arms package[1 August 2007]

US Senate unanimously passes threatening measure against Iran[14 July 2007]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/aug2007/iran-a16.shtml

Cheney Urging Strikes On Iran

Warren P. Strobel, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers
August 9, 2007

President Bush charged Thursday that Iran continues to arm and train insurgents who are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and he threatened action if that continues.

At a news conference Thursday, Bush said Iran had been warned of unspecified consequences if it continued its alleged support for anti-American forces in Iraq. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker had conveyed the warning in meetings with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad, the president said.

Bush wasn't specific, and a State Department official refused to elaborate on the warning.

Behind the scenes, however, the president's top aides have been engaged in an intensive internal debate over how to respond to Iran's support for Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq and its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney several weeks ago proposed launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran run by the Quds force, a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to two U.S. officials who are involved in Iran policy.

The debate has been accompanied by a growing drumbeat of allegations about Iranian meddling in Iraq from U.S. military officers, administration officials and administration allies outside government and in the news media. It isn't clear whether the media campaign is intended to build support for limited military action against Iran, to pressure the Iranians to curb their support for Shiite groups in Iraq or both.

Nor is it clear from the evidence the administration has presented whether Iran, which has long-standing ties to several Iraqi Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al Sadr and the Badr Organization, which is allied with the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, is a major cause of the anti-American and sectarian violence in Iraq or merely one of many. At other times, administration officials have blamed the Sunni Muslim group al Qaida in Iraq for much of the violence.

For now, however, the president appears to have settled on a policy of stepped-up military operations in Iraq aimed at the suspected Iranian networks there, combined with direct American-Iranian talks in Baghdad to try to persuade Tehran to halt its alleged meddling.

The U.S. military launched one such raid Wednesday in Baghdad's predominantly Shiite Sadr City district.

But so far that course has failed to halt what American military officials say is a flow of sophisticated roadside bombs, known as explosively formed penetrators, into Iraq. Last month they accounted for a third of the combat deaths among U.S.-led forces, according to the military.

Cheney, who's long been skeptical of diplomacy with Iran, argued for military action if hard new evidence emerges of Iran's complicity in supporting anti-American forces in Iraq; for example, catching a truckload of fighters or weapons crossing into Iraq from Iran, one official said.

The two officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly about internal government deliberations.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposes this idea, the officials said. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has stated publicly that "we think we can handle this inside the borders of Iraq."

Lea Anne McBride, a Cheney spokeswoman, said only that "the vice president is right where the president is" on Iran policy.

Bush left no doubt at his news conference that he intended to get tough with Iran.
"One of the main reasons that I asked Ambassador Crocker to meet with Iranians inside Iraq was to send the message that there will be consequences for . . . people transporting, delivering EFPs, highly sophisticated IEDs (improvised explosive devices), that kill Americans in Iraq," he said.

He also appeared to call on the Iranian people to change their government.

"My message to the Iranian people is, you can do better than this current government," he said. "You don't have to be isolated. You don't have to be in a position where you can't realize your full economic potential."

The Bush administration has launched what appears to be a coordinated campaign to pin more of Iraq's security troubles on Iran.

Last week, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. military commander in Iraq, said Shiite militiamen had launched 73 percent of the attacks that had killed or wounded American troops in July. U.S. officials think that majority Shiite Iran is providing militiamen with EFPs, which pierce armored vehicles and explode once inside.

Last month, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a multinational force spokesman, said members of the Quds force had helped plan a January attack in the holy Shiite city of Karbala, which lead to the deaths of five American soldiers. Bergner said the military had evidence that some of the attackers had trained at Quds camps near Tehran.

Bush's efforts to pressure Iran are complicated by the fact that the leaders of U.S.-supported governments in Iraq and Afghanistan have a more nuanced view of their neighbor.

Maliki is on a three-day visit to Tehran, during which he was photographed Wednesday hand in hand with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Unconfirmed media reports said Maliki had told Iranian officials they'd played a constructive role in the region.

Asked about that, Bush said he hadn't been briefed on the meeting. "Now if the signal is that Iran is constructive, I will have to have a heart-to-heart with my friend the prime minister, because I don't believe they are constructive. I don't think he in his heart of hearts thinks they're constructive either," he said.

Bush and Afghan President Hamid Karzai differed on Iran's role when they met last weekend, with Karzai saying in a TV interview that Iran was "a helper" and Bush challenging that view.

The toughening U.S. position on Iran puts Karzai and Iraqi leaders such as Maliki in a difficult spot between Iran, their longtime ally, and the United States, which is spending lives and treasure to secure their newly formed government.

A senior Iraqi official in Baghdad said the Iraqi government received regular intelligence briefings from the United States about suspected Iranian activities. He refused to discuss details, but said the American position worried him.

The United States is "becoming more focused on Iranian influence inside Iraq," said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss private talks with the Americans. "And we don't want Iraq to become a zone of conflict between Iran and the U.S."

Proposals to use force against Iran over its actions in Iraq mark a new phase in the Bush administration's long internal war over Iran policy.

Until now, some hawks within the administration — including Cheney — are said to have favored military strikes to stop Iran from furthering its suspected ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Rice has championed a diplomatic strategy, but that, too, has failed to deter Iran so far.

Patrick Clawson, an Iran specialist at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said a strike on the Quds camps in Iran could make the nuclear diplomacy more difficult.

Before launching such a strike, "We better be prepared to go public with very detailed and very convincing intelligence," Clawson said.

www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/18834.html

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=6997

Red Cross Confirms
Bush Administration And CIA
Used Torture In Interrogations

By Patrick Martin

A confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) suggests that Bush administration officials may have committed war crimes in the operation of CIA “secret prisons” overseas, according to a lengthy analysis published on the web site of the New Yorker magazine Sunday.

The Red Cross report concluded that the methods used in the CIA interrogation of alleged 9/11 terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda prisoners were “tantamount to torture” and that Bush administration officials had likely committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions.

The article by Jane Mayer, entitled “The Black Sites,” is the product of a series of interviews with former CIA officers involved in operating the agency’s secret prisons overseas, agents who directly participated in torture sessions and apparently concluded that the methods they were employing were either immoral or counterproductive, or both.

The New Yorker has become one of the principal conduits for dissent within the military/intelligence apparatus directed against the policies of the Bush White House. Mayer’s colleague, Seymour Hersh, wrote the first extensive report on the abuse of prisoners at the US military prison at Abu Ghraib, near Baghdad, as well as a series of exposés about US preparations for a military strike against Iran.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured by Pakistani authorities in early 2003, just before the US invasion of Iraq, and held at secret CIA locations for nearly four years before his transfer to Guantánamo Bay. Last March, the Pentagon made public his “confession” to carrying out or planning no less than 31 separate terrorist atrocities, a statement widely hailed in official circles as proof that torture—or, in Washington-speak, “enhanced interrogation techniques”—was an effective and legitimate practice in the “war on terror.”

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site noted the dubious character of Mohammed’s self-incriminating statements, in which he claimed responsibility for an improbable number of spectacular plots, including purported plans to destroy the Sears Tower, the Empire State Building and London’s Big Ben, and to assassinate former US President Jimmy Carter and Pope John Paul II. (See: “Washington exploits Guantánamo ‘confession’ to justify its crimes”)

No politically literate observer doubted that Mohammed had been severely tortured, and many said so, among them journalist Nat Hentoff (“Was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tortured?”) and Professor Anthony D’Amato of Northwestern University School of Law (“True Confessions: The Amazing Tale of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed”), who compared the 26-page “confession” to the self-indictments by prisoners in the Stalinist purge trials of the 1930s. Mayer’s article confirms, in fact, that the CIA actually employed torture techniques first developed by the Soviet KGB and copied by US intelligence agencies during the Cold War.

The International Committee of the Red Cross was given access to Mohammed late last year, after his transfer to Guantánamo Bay. The policy of the ICRC is to discuss its findings only with the government holding prisoners in custody, not with the press, in order to insure its continued access to prisoners. But, according to Mayer, the ICRC report on the 15 detainees held in the CIA’s secret prisons was circulated through the very highest levels of the White House, State Department and National Security Council, and to some congressmen on the House and Senate committees that oversee the intelligence agencies.

Mayer cited “congressional and other Washington sources familiar with the report,” writing that “one of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed ‘grave breaches’ of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the US Torture Act.” Mayer adds, “The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.”

In other words, those US government officials who authorized and carried out the torture of CIA prisoners could face war crimes charges before either an American or international tribunal, as could those who subsequently became aware of what was taking place in the secret prisons and covered it up.

According to Mayer’s article, the CIA use of torture was not a “rogue” operation, but a massive bureaucratic enterprise involving systematic research and development to find the “best” methods for breaking down prisoners. CIA officials reviewed the techniques employed by the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War as a model for the “war on terror.” The Phoenix Program involved the systematic assassination of an estimated 20,000 cadres, supporters and sympathizers of the National Liberation Front, as well as the widespread torture of prisoners.

The agency also sought interrogation advice from the secret police of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, all of which practice barbaric methods of torture against political prisoners. And one former military interrogator described the techniques of exerting total control over a prisoner’s environment as “the KGB model,” developed during the purges against political dissidents in the former Soviet Union, and subsequently mimicked by the CIA.

Among the techniques used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were prolonged sensory deprivation, continuous shackling while naked, use of a dog leash and female interrogators, forcible slamming into the walls of his cell, suspension from the ceiling of the interrogation room by his arms, and the now-notorious practice of waterboarding, the simulated drowning technique employed as torture since medieval times (when it became known as the “Chinese water torture.”)

One interrogation expert told Mayer, referring to the victims of the torture sessions: “People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

The torture was so severe and systematic that it had a profound psychological effect on some of the torturers themselves, according to Mayer, who interviewed one of those who interrogated Mohammed. This interrogator described a fellow torturer who now “has horrible nightmares ... It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

CIA officials repeatedly voiced concerns that the orders they were receiving from the White House, and particularly from Vice President Dick Cheney, might leave them vulnerable to criminal prosecution, particularly since they were instructed to keep prisoners like Mohammed alive and thereby preserve them as witnesses to their own abuse. As one official told Mayer, in a particularly chilling passage, “It would have been better if we had executed them.”

A former CIA official told Mayer that many agents had taken out liability insurance to help cover the anticipated legal bills when they face prosecution for prisoner abuse. There is a “high level of anxiety about political retribution,” he said, and “several guys expect to be thrown under the bus,” serving as fall guys for the decision-makers at the highest levels, including Bush, Cheney, former CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who, as White House counsel, supervised the process of giving a legal stamp of approval to torture.

Several leading congressional Democrats are well aware of the ICRC report, which was circulated to leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Congressman Sylvestre Reyes of Texas. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were likely “in the loop” as well.

This fact underscores the complicity of the congressional Democratic leadership, who only two days ago pushed through legislation that greatly expanded the domestic spying powers of an administration which they knew had been branded by the International Committee of the Red Cross as a serial perpetrator of war crimes.

Despite the sensational character of Mayer’s revelations, there has been relatively little comment on the subject in the American media. The Washington Post, in an article Sunday previewing the New Yorker account, confirmed the existence of the Red Cross report and its circulation at the highest levels in the US capital.

It cited “sources familiar with the document” as confirming that the detainees interviewed by the ICRC gave similar accounts of their torture even though they were held in isolation from each other and could not coordinate their stories. This reinforces the credibility of their testimony—as does the exporting of these methods from the CIA secret prisons and the Guantánamo Bay concentration camp to the US military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, where digital photographs made public in 2004 caused worldwide revulsion at US torture methods.

http://www.wsws.org./articles/2007/aug2007/tort-a07.shtml

The West And Islam
Should Not Be Allowed
To Remain On The Warpath

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 9 (Bernama) -- The West and Islam should not be allowed to remain on the warpath, with each side recycling old prejudices to denigrate the other, Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said.

"We need to develop new contexts for understanding each other. We need to lay a new foundation for a better future," he said in the Seventh Tun Razak Lecture souvenir book.

The lecture, entitled "The West and Islam: Rethinking Orientalism and Occidentalism" was delivered by Prof Dr Carl W. Ernst, a specialist in Islamic studies with focus on West and South Asia.

Najib was represented by Higher Education Minister Datuk Mustapa Mohamed at the function. Present were Universiti Malaya Vice-Chancellor Datuk Rafiah Salim, President of Ohio University Dr Roderick McDavis and Najib's brother, Datuk Nizam.

"It is equally important that people should correct the many wrongs done in the name of democracy and globalisation which, to all intents and purposes, have become the roots of today's international terrorism.

"For example, the West, equipped with its financial wherewithal, should do more to bridge the economic gap between itself and the Islamic world.

"With many Muslim countries still mired in poverty, and therefore a good breeding ground for all kinds of extremism, this is one way of arresting its growth," Najib said.

He said the negativism associated with those who preferred to look at Muslims and their religion in the light of their past showdowns with Islam smacked of orientalism at its worst.

"Orientalism may look like a thing of the past, but in reality, there are many researchers and writers, notably in the academia, who still draw sustenance from the uneasy relationship between the West and Islam based on their antagonistic encounters in the past," he said.

He said the "traders of knowledge" simply placed Islam in the political straightjacket by portraying it as a religion of violence.

"Muslims not only stand to suffer, but the whole of the international community too has to bear the consequences of their actions."

Najib said the occidentalists should not willy-nilly arrogate to themselves the right of judgment, including by making sweeping generalisations and wholesale condemnation of other civilisations.

-- BERNAMA
http://www.bernama.com