Italy's White Christmas Campaign

A woman walks past Northern League election posters in Milan in 2008. The posters read: "They suffered through immigration; now they live on reservations."

Uproar Over Italian Town's Foreigner Registration Drive

Officials in the northern Italian town of Coccaglio are visiting the homes of foreign residents and expelling those with expired residency permits. The initiative, which is called "White Christmas," has caused a national uproar, but city officials claim their words have been taken out of context.

November 23, 2009
Courtesy Of Der Spiegel Online

An initiative dubbed "White Christmas" to check the residency status of immigrants in a small town in northern Italy has created an uproar. While some city officials defend the action as a census with merely a poorly chosen title, others see it as another in a long chain of events revealing the growing power of Italian xenophobia.

The "White Christmas" initiative was launched on Oct. 25 in Coccaglio, a town of fewer than 7,000 people about an hour's drive east of Milan, in Lombardy. As part of the campaign, city officials are going to the homes of about 400 of the town's roughly 1,500 foreigners between now and Dec. 25 to check their immigration status papers. The majority of these immigrants are from Morocco, Albania and the former Yugoslavia. According to Italian daily La Repubblica, those who are found with residence permits that expired six months ago or earlier will be expelled if they cannot prove that they attempted to renew them.

The city's town council, which is controlled by three members of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's conservative People of Freedom party and four members of the right-wing and anti-immigrant Northern League, including Mayor Franco Claretti, chose the English title "White Christmas" from the famous Bing Crosby song of the same name.

"We don't have a crime problem," Claretti, who took office in June, told La Repubblica. "We just want to start cleaning things up." Claudio Abiendi, the city official in charge of security and a member of the Northern League since it was founded in 1992, had the idea for the initiative. "For me, Christmas isn't the celebration of hospitality but, rather, of Christian tradition and our identity," he told the paper. Abiendi also noted that, of the 150 inspections already carried out, roughly 50 percent found that the person no longer had a right to reside in Italy.

Offensive and Defensive

Such comments have led to an uproar in Italy. "It makes you think of the sound of the boots of the fascist soldiers in the ghetto of Rome chasing after Jewish inhabitants," Kurosh Danesh, the national coordinator for immigrants for the CGIL, Italy's largest trade union, told La Repubblica. Anna Finocchiaro, the leader of the opposition Democratic Party in the Italian Senate, said: "The Northern League's vision for our country is xenophobic, racist, violent and backwards." She added that, in Coccaglio, "people want to hunt down all the immigrants whose residence permits are expiring as part of the Christmas celebrations."

Claretti defends the initiative by saying that Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, a member of the Northern League, had been "practical" in allowing town councils to implement measures related to checking the residency status of foreigners "without having to appeal, as usual, to the courts." He also conceded that the name selected for the operation might have been ill-chosen. "Maybe it was unfortunate," he told La Repubblica, "but that's the day the initiative ends on."

It's a sentiment that has been echoed by Italian Reform Minister Umberto Bossi, the head of the Northern League. "The municipality was just applying the law," Bossi told La Repubblica, "even if there was no need to call the initiative 'White Christmas.' They could have called it 'Christmas Regularity Control.'"

Taken Out of Context?

The controversy came to a head after an interview with Abiendi was published in the Giornale di Treviglio, a paper of a small town halfway between Coccaglio and Milan. In a follow-up interview with the ASCA news agency, Abiendi claimed that the earlier article took his words out of context. "It was not a 'cleaning' operation, as it was presented in the article," Abiendi told ASCA, "but a type of census to ascertain the situation in the area around Coccaglio."

"The 'white' in the 'White Christmas' slogan is not meant to refer to the skin color of whoever is celebrating it." Abiendi added. "Instead, it's simply quoting a lyric from a well-known song to indicate that time as the deadline for the final verification measure."

According to the local news Web site Bresciaoggi.it (Italian only), at a televised encounter between the mayor and his critics on Sunday in front of Coccaglio's town hall, Claretti told those gathered that: "I won't allow anyone to call us racists. We are just conducting an initiative based on a law of (former Italian Prime Minister Romano) Prodi." Claudio Rossi, the leader of a local left-wing political group, reportedly responded: "No one is saying that the controls you are conducting violate the law. What's unacceptable are the declarations that accompany them, such as the name you chose."

The turmoil has led to worry among the town's residents that they will become the new symbols of Italian xenophobia. Last week, Giovanni Gritti, the head of the local Catholic parish, published a letter repeating that "Coccaglio is not racist!" He admitted that calling the initiative "White Christmas" was a "gross oversight," but he also took the Giornale di Treviglio and other media sources to task for using headlines such as "A Christmas without Immigrants" as "completely out of line, as well as offensive to good taste."

"Of the people I know here," Gritti said, "not one is racist."

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Dying To LIve In Europe

What Happens To Immigrants Who Don't Make It?

Not one single government in Europe registers how many immigrants die attempting to get across its borders. Nor do they try to find out who they were. But they have stories, if you know where to look.

November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of Der Spiegel Online

There were 18 people on board the Zodiac: 17 Afghans and one Turk who didn't know the way. In the last stretch of the 90-minute boat trip from the Turkish coast town Kucukkuyu to the Greek island Lesbos, the autumn wind threw them on the cliffs. Ten Afghans survived. The others, including a couple and their three children, ended up in the graves for the unknown refugees at Mytilini cemetery. They are buried at a distance from the flower-draped tombstones of the local Greek people, on the far end of the graveyard, close to the trash.

Few graves here carry names. Most only have numbers written on signs on top of the graves, themselves little more than molehills surrounded by bricks: Afghan 1, Afghan 5, Afghan 11. There are no names, no dates of birth, just the day they drowned off the coast: Oct. 29, 2009; Oct. 3, 2007; Nov. 25, 2007.

No one knows who they are, says an Afghan immigrant who survived the trip from Turkey on a rubber dinghy seven years ago. He is the only person who visits the anonymous graves on a weekly basis. "No one wants to know them," he says. "That is the problem."

He refuses to give his name. He has been staying in Greece illegally for seven years now and complaining is not a wise thing to do. But he is known to Afghans around the world as the only one of them who didn't travel on to other parts of Europe when he reached the continent, but stayed on Lesbos.

Self-Proclaimed Ambassador

He is now the self-proclaimed ambassador for boat refugees on the island. After each tragic accident, the next of kin find a way to reach him. Whenever news of drowning victims in the Aegean Sea gets out, he gets phone calls from Athens, Rome or Rotterdam. And there is always someone waiting in Afghanistan for the releasing call: "We've reached Lesbos, we're safe." If no one makes that call, those waiting phone him.

He tells those left behind what went wrong. Families ask him to take pictures of the grave, and of their faces. He takes pictures and mails them.

He doesn't always tell the families the whole truth. On Lesbos, Muslim immigrants are often buried without the Islamic burying rituals, without prayers, and with their feet rather than their heads facing Mecca.

"That is very painful," he says. "If I have to tell a mother her child did not just drown, but is buried in a way she wouldn't want him to be ..."

No Authority Knows How Many are Killed

No official records are kept of the migrants who die attempting to reach Europe. No government within the European Union is trying to discover their names; no authority knows how many are killed on the external borders of "Fortress Europe."

There are organizations that attempt to count the victims. United against Racism, a group that originated in the squatters movement, clips out reports from local papers and adds up the dead. They have counted 13,000 deceased migrants en route to Europe since 1994. Some died in shipwrecks off the Spanish coast of Lanzarote, some collapsed on their way through the Libyan desert, others stepped on Greek landmines near the Turkish border. The list is endless.

The Afghan living on Lesbos says many families try to get the bodies back home. "But it's an unwinnable battle. Repatriation costs thousands of euros. The trip from here to Athens, Athens to Kabul: unaffordable. And the Western embassies in Afghanistan don't give out visa to the bereaved to come pay their last respects to their loved ones."

As Though They Never Existed

As the only permanent Afghan resident of the island, he feels compelled to perform the burying rituals in the name of the families. If he is informed about a funeral in time, he will go and say the Islamic prayers. But he can't take on the imperative restrictions of the Greek law. Because of the distressing lack of burying grounds in Greece, all graves are cleared away after three years. In principle, the bones are then handed over to the family of the deceased.

"I have told the authorities this is against our religion, but nobody listens," he says. In all his years on Lesbos, he has not been able to find out what happens to the bones of his fellow countrymen after their graves are cleared. He fears they are destroyed. As though they never existed.

IMF Warns Second Bailout Would 'Threaten Democracy'

Angela Jameson and Elizabeth Judge
November 23, 2009
Courtesy Of The Times Online

The public will not bail out the financial services sector for a second time if another global crisis blows up in four or five years time, the managing-director of the International Monetary Fund warned this morning.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn told the CBI annual conference of business leaders that another huge call on public finances by the financial services sector would not be tolerated by the “man in the street” and could even threaten democracy.

"Most advanced economies will not accept any more [bailouts]...The political reaction will be very strong, putting some democracies at risk," he told delegates.

"I do believe that the financial sector needs to contribute both to the costs of the financial crisis and to reduce recourse to public funds in the future," he said.

Mr Strauss-Kahn said that imposing high capital ratio requirements on banks was one price the financial services sector must pay to prevent the threat of further multi-billion dollar bailouts.

He pointed to the debate in the US over the Troubled Asset Relief Programme and said that in many countries, including France and Germany, he doubted that politicians would secure the mandate needed to secure any further bail-outs if banks got in to trouble again, in several years' time.

Europe is in dispute over the spiralling cost of the global economic bailout, with Germany and France calling for a reduction in state support as their economies have shown signs of an upturn.

In September, George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, sided with Germany and France, accusing Gordon Brown of being in "complete denial" over the mounting bill of the financial rescue packages and agreed with Britain's neighbours that it was time to look for an exit strategy. Countries are recovering from recession at different rates, with Britain lagging behind.

Mr Strauss-Kahn said that while the global economy had made "remarkable" progress in exiting recession, and was on the cusp of recovery, it remained "highly vulnerable" to shocks.

He said state support for the world's battered economies must remain in place if a smooth recovery is to be achieved.

"We recommend erring on the side of caution as exiting too early is costlier than exiting too late."

Mr Strauss-Kahn is one of a series of high-profile speakers at the CBI conference, in Central London. Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg will all speak at the event as they seek to sway influential business leaders before a general election next year.

In his speech, Mr Strauss-Kahn also warned that the huge amounts of capital being pumped into China could fuel a pan-Asian bubble.

His comments come after warnings from economists that the economic conditions in China and the rest of Asia are such that asset prices could rip free of their fundamental values unless the bubble threat is addressed.

The Chinese banking sector is currently the scene of an unprecedented frenzy of new lending, which could reach up to 11,000 billion yuan (£97.7 billion) by the end of this year.

Mr Strauss-Khan said that the old paradigm of growth generation based on households in the US was dead. The future sources of growth and the recovery will "depend on a new balance between the US and deficit countries on one hand and emerging markets and surplus countries on the other".

Emerging markets will provide some of the growth that the US can no longer offer, however he warned that while China and other emerging Asian economies were shifting from exports to domestic demand, they still had some way to go.

Inside Israeli Jails

The Real Victims Of A Cry For Justice

By Jesse Rosenfeld
Last Updated: November 24. 2009 8:41PM UAE
November 24. 2009 4:41PM GMT
Courtesy Of The National

Amid the growing media fever over a possible prisoner swap involving the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas, another young captive has a less visible public profile – but personifies Israel’s chokehold on Palestinian self-expression.

Mohammad Othman, 33, from the West Bank town of Jayyous, and an activist with the grassroots Palestinian organisation Stop the Wall, was arrested on September 22 at the Allenby Bridge crossing on the Jordanian border. He was on his way home after a meeting in Norway with supporters of the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel (BDS). Adameer (Arabic for “conscience”), the Palestinian prisoners’ support and human rights organisation, contends that his arrest is a result of “his successful human rights advocacy and community activism”.

Mohammad was interrogated for two months at the Kishon detention centre in northern Israel. His lawyer told me he was repeatedly asked about his meetings, contacts and political activities in Europe. He alleges that Mohammad was kept in isolation, deprived of sleep, questioned round the clock, and threatened with death.

On Monday, Mohammad was formally placed in Israeli administrative detention for three months. He is the latest of more than 335 Palestinians held in this way, a practice based on a 1945 emergency British Mandate law and highlighted in a report last month by the Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and HaMoked.

I first met Mohammad Othman in Jayyous a year ago, during a protest against the annexation of the towns’s farmland to build Israel’s wall. Residents had just had their permits to cross the wall to their farms revoked, and had rekindled their earlier campaign of resistance. He led me down an alley as soldiers began retaking the main street with tear gas and rubber bullets, forcing young boys to retreat from the barricades that were blocking the military jeeps from driving through the town. “We constantly worry about army raids and arrests, all the local activists do,” he told me after we were out of the line of fire.

On Sunday, almost exactly a year after that in Jayyous, I watched Mohammad stand in front of a military tribunal housed in a barracks that looked like an oversized chicken-coop inside Israel’s Ofer prison in the West Bank. His lawyers were appealing against his prolonged detention without charge.

Outside the court, family members of other detained Palestinians clung to the fence, waiting for news about their loved ones. British and German consular officials and representatives from Israeli and international NGOs filled the small courtroom. Shackled at the legs, and having only a fraction of the proceedings against him translated, Mohammad raised his fist twice to the gallery in a gesture of strength and resistance.

Across the West Bank, just as in that courtroom, Israel is trying to tighten its grip on expressions of Palestinian self-determination. The border village of Bil’in has captured the international eye with a forceful and well-documented resistance campaign against the dispossession caused by Israel’s wall. It is precisely such international calls from Palestinian society that Israel is targeting with a systematic campaign of violence and incarceration inside its controlled territory.

This summer a committee of representatives from Bil’in visited Canada to support a lawsuit against two Israeli settlement construction companies registered in Montreal. When they returned, their leader, Mohammad Khatib, was arrested by the Israeli army. And while those two companies continued to build illegal homes on the farmland of Bil’in, the military conducted systematic raids into the village for three months.

When I last spoke to Mohammad Khatib in September, he was exhausted from a combination of the Ramadan fast and constant night-time army invasions. He told me that young people arrested in Bil’in were severely beaten by the army on the way to interrogation, and then had confessions beaten out of them.

Last Thursday, pressure on the town again escalated again when undercover Israeli soldiers beat and arrested a 19-year-old village activist, Mohammed Yasin. Gaby Lasky, the lawyer for the Bil’in detainees, says she has been told by the military prosecution that the army intends to put an end to the village’s anti-wall demonstrations by using the full force of the law against protesters.

And that is the strategy of Benjamin Netanyau: hit all pressure points. On the diplomatic stage he is demanding acquiescence from the Palestinians’ official representatives, but that policy is not limited to a public-relations dance with a Palestinian Authority that a growing number of people are calling to be dissolved. The aim is to turn the Palestinians’ internationally heard call for solidarity into a cry for Israeli mercy. It is being expressed in military raids on Palestinian homes, and in political prisoners held without trial in Israeli jails and tied to chairs in interrogation rooms.

Jesse Rosenfeld is a Canadian freelance journalist working in Israel and the Occupied Territories since 2007, and currently based in Jaffa

Britain Rejected Regime Change As Illegal

Iraq Inquiry In 2001

British officials discussed toppling Saddam Hussein in 2001 but rejected a policy of “regime change” as illegal under international law, the Iraq war inquiry has heard.

By James Kirkup and Gordon Rayner
Published: 4:48PM GMT 24 Nov 2009
Courtesy Of The Telegraph

On its opening day of public hearings, Sir John Chilcot’s public inquiry into the invasion heard that British diplomats heard the “drumbeat” of war emanating from Washington even before the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The inquiry into the war, which cost 179 lives, opened yesterday with a promise from Sir John, a former Whitehall mandarin, to "get to the heart of what happened" and "not shy away" from criticising anyone who made mistakes.

The first day of the inquiry in central London was attended by several relatives of service personnel killed in Iraq. Outside, a small number of protesters gathered, several with fake blood on their hands accusing Tony Blair, the former prime minister of war crimes.

Inside, the inquiry’s questioning focussed on British policy towards Iraq in 2001, the year George W Bush became US president.

Sir William Patey, head of Middle East policy at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office at the time, told the inquiry that he wrote a briefing paper on the options for Iraqi policy.

“We had at the end the regime-change option,” he said, “We dismissed that at the time as having no basis in law.”

Sir William said that the UK knew that some in the new US administration wanted to topple Saddam. "We were aware of the drum beats from Washington. Our policy was to stay away from that," he said.

The inquiry heard that in 2001, the settled view of the UK government was that attacking Iraq would have been illegal under international law.

Sir Peter Ricketts, then the political director at the FCO, told the inquiry: "We quite clearly distanced our self from regime change. It was clear that was something there would not be any legal base for."

The diplomats’ evidence will focus attention on the decisions that led Mr Blair to change Britain’s policy and support the military action that removed Saddam in 2003.

Sir Peter, who also chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee, said that only weeks after the September 11 attacks, US officials began to discuss “phase two of the war on terrorism,” shifting their attention from Afghanistan to Iraq.

“We heard people in Washington suggesting that there might be some link between Saddam and [Osama] Bin Laden.” he said. “We began to get that sort of voice early on.”

Officials suggested that it was the September 11 attacks and the events that followed had ultimately shifted the British view.

In 2001, Britain and the US were committed to a policy of containing Saddam, through economic sanctions, restricting his oil sales through the oil-for-food programme, and the imposition of no-fly zones in southern and northern Iraq.

The diplomats told the inquiry that the containment policy was failing in 2001, but it could have remained viable if the United Nations had agreed to new "smart sanctions" on Saddam and the return of UN weapons inspectors.

The September attacks changed that, Sir Peter said. "I think if 9/11 had not happened, we would have remained convinced that a strengthened sanctions regime, tightened, narrowed, was the right way to go and we would have continued to push to get weapons inspectors back in.”

Simon Webb, the former policy chief at the Ministry of Defence, told the inquiry that the September attacks increased Britain’s concerns about the possibility of terrorist groups obtained weapons of mass destruction from a regime like Saddam’s.

After the attacks, he said, “the focus didn’t shift to regime change, the focus shifted to

WMD. In order to order to deal with the WMD problem in Iraq, you would probably end up having to push Saddam out. That was the sequence of events. It wasn’t hopping straight to regime change.”

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• Iraq inquiry: profile of Sir John Chilcot

Blair Told Saddam Had No Chemical Weapons 10 Days Before Invasion

By Doireann Ronayne and Alex Stevenson
Wednesday, 25, Nov 2009 04:51
Courtesy Of Politics UK

Tony Blair received intelligence that Iraq's chemical and biological weapons had been dismantled just days before the invasion of Iraq, it has been revealed.

Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Sir William Ehrman, director general of defence and intelligence in the Foreign Office from 2002 to 2004, said: "On March 10th we got a report saying that the chemical weapons might have remained disassembled and that Saddam hadn't yet ordered their re-assembly and he might lack warheads capable of effective dispersal of agents."

Ten days later the invasion of Iraq began.

Meanwhile, the inquiry heard that evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq was "pretty sparse".

Tim Dowse, head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office from 2001 to 2003, told Sir John Chilcot's committee he agreed that a "particular mindset" about Iraq had been adopted and that more care could have been taken with the intelligence received.

But he pressed that while most WMD were built for defence, Saddam's intention "with his history of aggression" was clearly offensive.

Sir William emphasised that other Middle Eastern countries posed a greater threat than Iraq.

"In 2001 Libya and Iran were ahead of Iraq in terms of being more threatening about WMD," he said.

Sir William confirmed that contact between Iraq and al-Qaida existed but said Saddam was not "in any way responsible" for the September 11th 2001 terror attacks against New York.

The Iraqi dictator's government supported Palestinian terrorist groups and the MEK terror group directed against Iran, however.

Mr Dowse said Saddam Hussein's government had contacts with al-Qaida but Iraq and the terrorist organisation were not "natural allies".

He also argued the infamous 45-minute deployment claim for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction "didn't seem out of line".

It had taken on an "iconic status" because of media reports, Mr Dowse argued.

Committee member Lawrence Freedman concluded the 45-minute claim had got "lost in translation" because the public understood it referred to nuclear weapons, not chemical battlefield weapons.

On the French proposal for a different type of inspection, Mr Dowse said that this would have been a "hiatus" and had little confidence it would have produced a different outcome.

"The liar was telling the truth," Sir John concluded on the actual findings of weapons in Iraq.

Ballistic missiles – that have a range well beyond 150km – were found, while chemical munitions were also discovered in small numbers in the south of Iraq. The chemical weapons appeared to be left over from the 1991 Gulf war, however.

"What we had was a 20,000 piece jigsaw, of which 15,000 pieces had been hidden," Mr Dowse said.

He was concerned that ministers should not declare success too rapidly on the discovery of weapons. Sir Roderic Lyne questioned whether the prime minister's statement in September 2004 that the Iraq Survey Group "had already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories" corresponded to that advice.

Mr Dowse replied that he had not advised Mr Blair, before Sir William defended the response of the UK government.

"We removed the long-term threat to Iraq by the action that was taken. We disrupted but did not remove the Al Quaeda threat in Afghanistan and we removed the treat to Iran through diplomatic action and an agreement to suspend enrichment activities," he said.

The chair concluded by observing the lack of WMDs found in Iraq was a "rather embarrassing outcome” for the government.

Tomorrow Sir Christopher Mayer – UK ambassador to Washington in 2003 - will speak at the inquiry on US foreign policy priorities and US decision-making.

'We're Not in Afghanistan to Build a Perfect Democracy'

Interview with US Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke

The US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, spoke to SPIEGEL about

November 24, 2009
Courtesy Of Der Spiegel Online

SPIEGEL: You were part of President Johnson's Vietnam team, you even wrote some parts of the Pentagon Papers, which uncovered the real history of the Vietnam War. What have you learnt from that experience and can you draw it in your current job?

Richard Holbrooke: I was a very young man when I worked on Vietnam between 1963 and 1969. I worked in the field and in the Johnson White House, as well as being a member of the negotiating team in Paris. I watched people confront great decisions, and from that close observation, I think I learned how to approach such difficult moments and try to analyze them.

SPIEGEL: With that experience in the back of your mind, do you think it really pays for the United States to fight wars in far-off and unstable lands, especially those that have acquired a reputation for being a "graveyard of empires?"

Holbrooke: Of course it's difficult to fight in Afghanistan. But it's necessary because of 9/11. That is the core difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam. We're not in Afghanistan to build a perfect democracy. We know these were not perfect elections. But we must go ahead, we must help the Afghans strengthen their own capabilities. We're not there to take over the country, we're there to help the Afghans build their own capacity so that their security forces can replace the international forces over an acceptable period of time.

SPIEGEL: Has the thought crossed your mind, even for a brief moment, that American troops might leave Afghanistan the way the Soviets left Afghanistan, namely defeated?

Holbrooke: No. I have talked to the former Russian ambassador in Kabul, who has the wonderful name of Zamir Kabulov. He is now my counterpart in Moscow. As a young Soviet diplomat he participated in the entire drama, and he saw it all.

SPIEGEL: And what was the most important thing you learned from speaking to him?

Holbrooke: Well, don't do what the Soviets did, which was to strafe and kill an incredible number of people with their strikes. The American forces and our allies in Afghanistan do not do that. General Stanley McChrystal has issued very careful guidelines on the use of force. And the civilian casualties issue is not remotely the same as it was then. The Soviets were hated. NATO is not.

SPIEGEL: How serious is the situation? McChrystal insists on 40,000 additional troops. He has even said that anything else would amount to a call for the "helicopter on the roof of the embassy" -- an analogy to Vietnam.

Holbrooke: I'm not going to comment on the internal discussions, but General McChrystal's public assessment of the situation is similar to my own assessment.

Afghanistan

Related articles, background features and opinions about this topic.

SPIEGEL: You were part of President Johnson's Vietnam team, you even wrote some parts of the Pentagon Papers, which uncovered the real history of the Vietnam War. What have you learnt from that experience and can you draw it in your current job?

Richard Holbrooke: I was a very young man when I worked on Vietnam between 1963 and 1969. I worked in the field and in the Johnson White House, as well as being a member of the negotiating team in Paris. I watched people confront great decisions, and from that close observation, I think I learned how to approach such difficult moments and try to analyze them.

SPIEGEL: With that experience in the back of your mind, do you think it really pays for the United States to fight wars in far-off and unstable lands, especially those that have acquired a reputation for being a "graveyard of empires?"

Holbrooke: Of course it's difficult to fight in Afghanistan. But it's necessary because of 9/11. That is the core difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam. We're not in Afghanistan to build a perfect democracy. We know these were not perfect elections. But we must go ahead, we must help the Afghans strengthen their own capabilities. We're not there to take over the country, we're there to help the Afghans build their own capacity so that their security forces can replace the international forces over an acceptable period of time.

SPIEGEL: Has the thought crossed your mind, even for a brief moment, that American troops might leave Afghanistan the way the Soviets left Afghanistan, namely defeated?

Holbrooke: No. I have talked to the former Russian ambassador in Kabul, who has the wonderful name of Zamir Kabulov. He is now my counterpart in Moscow. As a young Soviet diplomat he participated in the entire drama, and he saw it all.

SPIEGEL: And what was the most important thing you learned from speaking to him?

Holbrooke: Well, don't do what the Soviets did, which was to strafe and kill an incredible number of people with their strikes. The American forces and our allies in Afghanistan do not do that. General Stanley McChrystal has issued very careful guidelines on the use of force. And the civilian casualties issue is not remotely the same as it was then. The Soviets were hated. NATO is not.

SPIEGEL: How serious is the situation? McChrystal insists on 40,000 additional troops. He has even said that anything else would amount to a call for the "helicopter on the roof of the embassy" -- an analogy to Vietnam.

Holbrooke: I'm not going to comment on the internal discussions, but General McChrystal's public assessment of the situation is similar to my own assessment.

PHOTO GALLERY

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Photo Gallery: Holbrooke on Afghanistan

SPIEGEL: For weeks the president's security team has very openly thought and talked about the new strategy for Afghanistan. Why has it taken so long to reach a decision?

Holbrooke: I've been privileged to participate in most of these discussions. This is the most careful, methodical approach that I have ever seen.

SPIEGEL: Are there any right ways to move forward in this war? Many experts are already putting it into the category of "unwinnable" wars.

Holbrooke: We have to define what our goals are. We're not seeking to destroy every person who supports the Taliban, that's not a credible goal. Our goal is to destroy al-Qaida, a terrorist organization with global reach which attacked the United States, which conducted attacks in London, Madrid and Bali, and Mumbai and Islamabad, which supports attacks in Afghanistan through other groups.

SPIEGEL: So you want to distinguish between extremist Taliban and those who are merely hangers-on?

Holbrooke: Secretary of State Clinton laid out in July very clearly that the majority of the Taliban do not support Mullah Omar's extreme views and that there is room for them to rejoin the social and political fabric of Afghanistan if they renounce al-Qaida and reintegrate peacefully into Afghanistan. And that is a major part of our policies.

SPIEGEL: But there is still the question of the additional troops. National Security Adviser General James L. Jones has told SPIEGEL that even 200,000 troops would get "swallowed up" in that country. He drew the conclusion that there cannot be an exclusively military solution to the problem.

Holbrooke: I agree with General Jones. I just said the same thing. The whole goal here is to create enough time and space for the Afghans to take over their own security responsibility. That is the core of the strategy.

SPIEGEL: What is enough time and space?

Holbrooke: I'm not going to give you a specific timetable.

SPIEGEL: Is this the beginning of America's retreat?

Holbrooke: I don't understand that question. This administration has committed 21,000 additional troops and they are considering sending more. The president has said publicly that we are not going to abandon Afghanistan. Our allies, including Germany, Great Britain and France and others are increasing their commitments. Japan just announced a $5 billion aid program. So why would people think that we are retreating when, in fact, we are increasing our efforts to help the Afghans and resist the al-Qaida and keep the Taliban off-balance so that the government can now do its job?

SPIEGEL: Nonetheless, you hear a lot less about nation-building these days and more and more about exit strategies.

Holbrooke: Our concept includes that the United States and its allies will help the Afghans on the civilian side to build up their capacity. It's not nation-building, there is a nation in Afghanistan and it's been there for a long time.

SPIEGEL: The West was so proud about all those girls' schools that sprang up with international help. Can you guarantee that those girls' schools will still be there in 10 years?

Holbrooke: Can I guarantee it? I can't, but I hope they will be.

• Part 2: 'Nobody Can Call the Training of the Police a Success'

SPIEGEL: When the US has talked about handing over the responsibility for a war to local forces in the past, it represented the final stage before a complete collapse.

Holbrooke: You keep going back to the wrong war and I would rather just focus on Afghanistan.

SPIEGEL: Giving responsibility to local forces sounds nice but can be difficult. Take police training. First, the Germans trained too few police officers well and then the Americans trained a lot of police officers, too quickly and too poorly. Is that really a success?

Holbrooke: Nobody can call the training of the police a success in the last five or six years. We are changing the entire approach to police training. American military units especially trained to train the police and the army are coming in now to work on that and we recognize that that is probably the weakest link in the chain.

SPIEGEL: You talked about the allies in this war. Some countries, among them the Germans, announced sending more troops. But others are withdrawing, for example Canada and the Netherlands. What will Obama demand from his allies in the future?

Holbrooke: The European contributions have been extremely important and I hope they will continue. I just talked about it with London, Paris and Berlin. Those were good talks, but each country has to make its own decisions.

SPIEGEL: In the past German forces in Afghanistan were sometimes ridiculed because of their strict rules of engagement.

Holbrooke: Germany has had over 30 soldiers killed, I don't think that's anything to laugh about. I used to serve as ambassador in Germany. I was there when the Karlsruhe decision of July 1994 opened the door for deploying Germans outside of Germany for the first time since the end of World War II and I saw how difficult it was. Then there was Kosovo and now you have Germans risking their lives in Afghanistan. Moreover, the Germans are giving a lot of economic aid. We should respect that.

SPIEGEL: For the first time Chancellor Angela Merkel and the new Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg have spoken about "warlike circumstances"…

Holbrooke: … but there is a war going on in Afghanistan.

SPIEGEL: Until now German politicians were very successful in avoiding that word.

Holbrooke: What does SPIEGEL say?

SPIEGEL: SPIEGEL says it is a war.

Holbrooke: Just so.

SPIEGEL: Is the Afghan President Hamid Karzai still America's partner in this war?

Holbrooke: Karzai is the re-elected president of Afghanistan. We respect that and we look forward to working with him very closely. Yes, he is our partner.

SPIEGEL: You are on your way to Kabul -- are you going to tell him who he can appoint as governors and ministers in his government?

Holbrooke: We are going to urge him to pick competent people who are up to the job, who are strong leaders. Afghanistan suffers from a tremendous lack of strong leadership talent after 30 years of continuous war. But there are some very good people in the country and we're going to encourage him to appoint strong province governors and good ministers.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Holbrooke, thank you very much for the interview.

Interview conducted by Hans Hoyng

Whatever Happened To The CIA's Black Sites?

The CIA ordered its secret prisons closed, but lawyers for terrorism suspects want them preserved as possible evidence—and the CIA won't say what's going on.

By David Corn Tue
November 24, 2009 2:50 AM PST
Courtesy Of Mother Jones

Whatever happened to the so-called "black sites," where suspected terrorists were held overseas by the CIA and submitted to harsh interrogations that included torture? On April 9, CIA chief Leon Panetta issued a statement notifying CIA employees that the agency "no longer operates detention facilities or black sites"—which were effectively shut down in the fall of 2006—"and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites." In the months since then, lawyers for several terrorism suspects have been trying to determine the status of these sites, as they seek evidence for their cases. But the US government has refused to disclose anything about what it has done with these facilities.

In his statement, Panetta noted, "I have directed our Agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated." (He added that the suspension of these private security contracts would save the agency up to $4 million.) Though Panetta's order might have seemed like good news to civil libertarians and critics of the Bush-Cheney administration's detention policies, lawyers for several detainees who had been held in such sites immediately worried about one thing: "We thought they would be destroying further evidence," says George Brent Mickum IV, a lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, a captured terrorism suspect whom President George W. Bush described (probably errantly) as "one of the top three leaders" of al Qaeda. (In 2007, the CIA disclosed that it had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times.)

Four days after Panetta announced the decommissioning of the black sites, Paul Turner and Gerald Bierbaum, two public defenders in Las Vegas representing Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, an al Qaeda leader accused of plotting the USS Cole bombing, filed an emergency motion in federal court requesting the "preservation of CIA secret detention facilities." Attorneys for Zubaydah—whose significance as a terrorism suspect has been hotly debated—filed a similar motion, asking a federal court judge in Washington DC to preserve the black sites where Zubaydah was held and the interrogation instruments used at these facilities. "It's a crime scene," says Joseph Margulies, an attorney for Zubaydah. Margulies says that his intent is to obtain evidence that will allow him to reconstruct what occurred when Zubaydah was held: "to recreate the stress the person was under." He is particularly interested in obtaining access to the "dog box," a small cage in which Zubaydah says he was kept for a prolonged period.

Turner and Bierbaum, who in July 2008 filed a habeas case on behalf of al-Nashiri, are also seeking evidence regarding the interrogation of their client. "Physical evidence matters," says Turner. "It's pretty good proof that what happened did happen. It's better validation of a client's story."

Al-Nashiri and Zubaydah are two of the three detainees whom the CIA has acknowledged were waterboarded. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, was the third. All three are now imprisoned at the Guantanamo camp. When Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that Mohammed will be transfered to New York City to stand trial in a civilian court, he said that al-Nashiri would be tried in a military commission. He said nothing about Zubaydah. As one of the first suspected al Qaeda operatives nabbed--and Zubaydah's standing as a senior al Qaeda operative is now uncertain--he was treated to particularly tough interrogations, which has made his case especially hard for the Obama administration to resolve.

Lawyers for another terrorism suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantanamo detainee now being tried in civilian court in New York City for allegedly participating in the plot to blow up US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, have also asked a federal court judge to order the US government to preserve black sites where their client was held.

Many of the filings in cases related to the black sites have been stamped secret and kept out of the public record. Gregory Cooper, a lawyer for Ghailani, citing classification restrictions, won't say what he's hoping to find at any black sites where his client was held: "I can't tell you."

Lawyers representing al-Nashiri and Zubaydah say that no decisions related to their requests to preserve the covert facilities have been issued. In the al-Nashiri case, Justice Department attorneys noted that the request to preserve the secret detention facilities involves "highly sensitive issues affecting critical national security interests"—without spelling out the issues or the interests. Government lawyers in these two cases, though, have promised that the status quo at the secret prisons would be preserved until further notice is given to the legal team for these detainees, but they have not provided any information about the current condition of the black sites. It could be that the facilities were decommissioned before the promise to preserve the status quo was made. "They could have destroyed the sites before the motion," says Bierbaum. Mickum adds, "If they already destroyed the stuff, preserving the status quo is meaningless." He notes that Justice Department lawyers have filed a secret motion in response to Zubaydah's lawyers' request to preserve the black sites—and the Zubaydah attorneys don't know what it said.

Was anything left at these black sites to preserve? No doubt, some of these facilities were makeshift and could have been packed up rather quickly and their equipment destroyed or shipped off. If records existed at these facilities, they could have been easily shredded. In any case, even though Panetta has publicly discussed the sites, the CIA is refusing to discuss them. "Because this involves a matter before the court, it's not something on which I can comment publicly," remarks CIA spokesperson Paul Gimigliano. That is, he won't confirm or deny if Panetta's public decommission order has been carried out. The final status of these facilities remains in the dark.

David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter.

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The Extreme Secrecy Of The Federal Courts

By Glenn Greenwald
Monday, Nov 23, 2009 03:24 PST
Courtesy Of The Salon Media Group

(updated below)

Once conservatives became embarrassed by their cowardly warnings that we would all be killed if we held a 9/11 trial in New York, they switched to a new argument: trials in a real court would lead to the disclosure of classified information that would help the Terrorists. In advancing this claim, they relied on the always-unhinged rantings of National Review's Andy McCarthy -- who has also suggested that Bill Ayers was the real author of Barack Obama's "Dreams from my Father"; attacked his own editors for pointing out the falsehoods of Sarah Palin's "death panel" claims, which McCarthy insisted were true; defended the Birther movement and dissented from NR's editorial rejection of it; and was excoriated by Rich Lowry for claiming that Obama "rather likes tyrants and dislikes America." This person -- someone who is often too fringe, hysterical and delusional even for National Review -- is the "legal expert" on which the Right is relying to claim that real trials will jeopardize classified information.

To see how false this claim is, all anyone ever had to do was look at the Classified Information Procedures Act, a short and crystal clear 1980 law that not only permits, but requires, federal courts to undertake extreme measures to ensure the concealment of classified information, even including concealment from the defendant himself. Section 3 provides: "Upon motion of the United States, the court shall issue an order to protect against the disclosure of any classified information disclosed by the United States to any defendant in any criminal case in a district court of the United States." Section 9 required the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to consult with the Attorney General and Defense Secretary to develop rules to carry out the Act's requirements, and the resulting guidelines provide for draconian measures so extreme that it's hard to believe they can exist in a judicial system that it supposed to be open and transparent.

• Continue Reading

To see how severe these secrecy measures are, consider what is currently being done in the criminal case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first accused Terrorists sent by the Obama administration to New York to stand trial after being interrogated and tortured for years in CIA black sites and at Guantanamo with no charges:

To ensure that secrets do not leak, Judge Kaplan has imposed a protective order on all classified information, which may be reviewed by the defense lawyers only in a special "secure area," a room whose location has not been disclosed.

The order covers all materials that might "reveal the foreign countries in which" Mr. Ghailani was held from 2004 to 2006 -- the period when he was in the secret jails -- and the names and even physical descriptions of any officer responsible for his detention or interrogation, the order says.

It also covers information about "enhanced interrogation techniques that were applied" to Mr. Ghailani, "including descriptions of the techniques as applied, the duration, frequency, sequencing, and limitations of those techniques."

The defense lawyers, who had to obtain security clearance, cannot disclose the information to Mr. Ghailani without permission of the court or the government. Any motions they write based on the material must be prepared in the special room, and nothing may be filed publicly until it is reviewed by the government.

So, last Monday, when Mr. Ghailani’s lawyers filed a motion seeking dismissal of the charges because of "the unnecessary delay in bringing the defendant to trial," they included only a few mostly blank cover sheets.

The rest of the motion, which presumably offers rich details about Mr. Ghailani’s time in detention, remains secret, and a censored version will be made public only after it is cleared by the government.

Does that sound like a judicial process incapable of concealing secrets, or does it sound more like a Star Chamber where the justice system operates in the dark, even to shield government torture and illegal prisons from disclosure? Many federal judges -- particularly in criminal cases -- are notorious for being highly sympathetic to the government. That's even more true in a case involving one of the most hated criminal defendants ever to be tried in an American court, sitting a very short distance from the site where he is alleged to have killed 3,000 people in a terrorist attack. And note that the law permits the judge no discretion: if the Government claims something is classified, then "the court shall issue an order to protect against the disclosure of any classified information." With some exceptions, ever since the "War on Terror" began, nobody has safeguarded government secrets as dutifully and subserviently as federal judges -- even when those secrets involve allegations of war crimes and other serious felonies. That's what DOJ officials mean when they keep praising Southern District of New York judges for their supreme competence and expertise in handling terrorism cases. Federal courts in general love to keep what is supposed to be their open proceedings a secret, but that instinct is magnified exponentially in national security and terrorism cases.

Even during the Bush years, numerous defendants accused of terrorist acts were tried and convicted in federal courts -- John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, Ali al-Marri, Jose Padilla. Those spewing the latest right-wing scare tactic (Osama bin Laden will learn everything if we have trials!) cannot point to a single piece of classified information that was disclosed as a result of any of these trials. If that were a legitimate fear, wouldn't they be able to? Like most American institutions, our federal court system is empowered to shield from public disclosure anything the government claims is secret. Just look at the extreme measures invoked in the Ghailani case to see how true that is.

UPDATE: As indicated, nobody -- including the right-wing fear-mongers -- can claim that any of the numerous terrorist trials conducted over the last ten years resulted in the release of any classified or other harmful information. Standing alone, that fact illustrates how baseless is this fear; if "disclosure of sensitive information" were a real risk, wouldn't they be able to point to instances where that happened during any of the numerous Bush-era terrorist trials?

The sole example cited by the Right is the 1995 trial of accused World Trade Center bomber Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Both Andrew McCarthy, who was one of the prosecutors in that case, and former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was the judge presiding over the trial, have made the claim that the Rahman trial resulted in the disclosure of secret information that Osama bin Laden somehow used to his benefit.

Even leaving to the side the fact that these two individuals are among the most extreme right-wing ideologues who always insist that we must abandon our normal rules of justice lest we get slaughtered by the Terrorists, one of two things is true regarding their claim about that trial: either (1) McCarthy and/or Mukasey failed to use the protections of CIPA to prevent the disclosure of classified information, which means the disclosures were the result of their ineptitude or disregard for the law, not a natural by-product of terrorist trials; or (2) the released information was not "classified," which -- given how the U.S. Government classifies virtually everything it can find -- renders highly dubious their fear-mongering claim that Osama benefited from non-classified information released at the 1995 trial. Adam Serwer elaborates on this latter point here.

Afghanistan Is A "War Of National Resistance"

Former CIA Agent

By Rethink Afghanistan
Video Posted November 25, 2009
Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

In the latest video from the Brave New Foundation's "Rethink Afghanistan" project, former CIA agent Robert Bear says that what the U.S. faces when it comes to the Afghan insurgency isn't terrorism, but a war of national resistance. "The people that want their country liberated from the West have nothing to do with Al Qaeda," Baer says. "They simply want us gone because we're foreigners, and they're rallying behind the Taliban because the Taliban are experienced, effective fighters." Because these insurgents see the U.S. as a colonial force, Baer says, they are unlikely to ever rally around the Afghan national army the U.S. is looking to establish. "This is an occupying force," explains Matthew Hoh, a former U.S. official in Afghanistan who resigned last month over the war. "The Afghan National Army is led by Tajiks and Uzbeks and urban Pashtuns, and it is occupying the rural Pashtun South." This is why the U.S. should ask itself, Hoh says, "do we want to support one side in a civil war?"