Mission & Justice

6/5/08

Five Afghan detainees who were released from Guantanamo Bay last week have been sent to jail upon their arrival in Afghanistan. They had been detained at Guantanamo Bay with the Al Jazeera cameraman, Sami al-Hajj. Al-Hajj and the Afghan detainees were on the same plane after they were released from the US military prison. he detainees, who have been taken to the Pul-i-Charkhe prison on the outskirts of Kabul, the Afghan capital, will now face Afghan courts. Detainees from Guantanamo Bay and any other US prison facility are usually transferred to Afghan custody once they are released.

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James Emery; 6/5/08

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the export value of Afghanistan’s opium production was about $4 billion last year, of which 24 percent went to those working at the lower to middle end of the opium chain. The bulk of the money goes to regional and international trafficking organizations that have ties with the Taliban, terrorists, and multinational criminal organizations. “Counter-narcotics is one of the key challenges,” said Ashraf Haidari, political counselor at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Washington, D.C. “I think that unless we resolve the narcotics problem, it can undo many of our achievements, especially the governance and the rule of law. Narcotics traders are corrupting everyone that is not paid well; the police primarily, but also the judicial system up to institutions that constitute the face of the government.”

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Tom Hyland; 4/5/08

Prisoners captured by Australian and Dutch troops in Afghanistan allege they have been beaten after being handed over to the notorious Afghan secret police. While the Australian Defence Force says there is no evidence prisoners taken by Australian troops have been mistreated, official documents show three have complained they were beaten around the head by secret police after being captured by the Dutch-Australian taskforce. The Dutch documents show prisoners are routinely handed over to Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), which human rights groups accuse of torturing and abusing prisoners.

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Mark Dodd; 29/4/08

Australian troops in Afghanistan face a “difficult and dangerous and bloody” year, and the nation must be prepared for further deaths, Kevin Rudd warned yesterday. In his bleakest yet assessment of the challenge facing coalition forces in Afghanistan, the Prime Minister said history was against foreign military forces operating in the war-torn country but Australia was in for the “long haul”. His grim warning follows the death of special forces soldier Lance Corporal Jason Marks, 27, from the Sydney-based 4th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment. Four other commandos received serious wounds. Corporal Marks was the fifth Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan since coalition troops launched their campaign against the Taliban and al-Qa’ida in 2002. Four Australians have now died since October last year.

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Mark Mazzetti; 28/4/08
USA Intelligence operatives trying to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods prohibited under international law, the US Justice Department has told Congress. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still secret rules for interrogations by the CIA. It shows that the Administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order that President George Bush said meant that the CIA would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees. The Geneva Convention prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity”, but a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the Administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgements.

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23/4/08

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle. “I’d fall asleep [after the shot],” Mr Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his lawyer at the military prison in Cuba. After being roused, Mr Nusairi eventually did talk, giving US officials what he later described as a made-up confession to get some peace. “I was completely gone,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I’m a member of al-Qaeda, I will.’ ”

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21/4/08

The Pentagon has used military analysts in a campaign to generate favourable news coverage of the Bush Administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found. The men appeared tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service had equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-September 11 world. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus intended to shape coverage. The effort, which began with the build-up to the Iraq war and continues today, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air. Those business relationships are rarely disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks. But collectively the analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants.

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Ross Fitzgerald; 18/4/08

The Bush Tragedy; Jacob Weisberg; Bloomsbury

It now seems indisputable that America’s 43rd president, George W. Bush, is directly responsible for the current chaos in Iraq, which, as each year goes by, is a national and international disaster even more terrible than the American war in Vietnam. Yet at the beginning of his two-term presidency - and despite his personal flaws and doubts about the legitimacy of his electoral victory - things looked quite hopeful. Some key questions asked by Jacob Weisberg in this powerfully engaging book include how did a politician of such evidently limited abilities find himself in the position of being the most powerful man in the world and how and why did half of America initially fall for Bush before he experienced such a massive falling out?

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19/4/08

More than 300,000 USA military veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression, new research released yesterday estimates. The study by a team at the Rand Corporation, a non-profit US think tank, showed mental disorders were more prevalent and lasting than previously known, surfacing belatedly and lingering after troops had been discharged. The study also concluded that about 320,000 veterans of those conflicts experienced a “probable” traumatic brain injury (TBI) during deployment, but the long-term impact on mental health was unclear. Military officials praised the Rand study, which was consistent with their own studies, and said it would reinforce efforts to try to improve mental healthcare. The findings were extrapolated from a survey of 1926 recently returned service members. The sample was designed to represent the 1.6 million troops who had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002.

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Jonathan Power; 18/4/08

If the US prosecution system weren’t so generally competent, I would advocate referring the US to the International Criminal Court so that senior figures in the Bush administration could be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity, in particular the use of torture. But it is competent, although it has been hamstrung by the clever legal footwork of the Bush administration, plus the use of the presidential veto - as with the recent veto of legislation that would have required the CIA and all intelligence services to abide by the restrictions contained in the US Army Field Manual on holding and interrogating prisoners. We all know that the US practices torture against terrorist suspects - water boarding or simulated drowning is clearly that - and we all know that when a new president is elected, given the clear statements of the remaining three candidates, the practice will stop. What we don’t know is if a new president will have the guts to open the windows in the Justice Department and allow the fresh air of the rule of law to blow into every corner.

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