Promise Delayed: Obama to Miss Guantanamo Closure Deadline?

The news is unsurprising, but it is still depressing. On Monday, a story in the Los Angeles Times (see below) raised concerns that President Obama will not fulfil his headline pledge to close the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay within a year of his inauguration. Quoting Administration officials, the report by Greg Miller and David Savage said, "Two reports that were supposed to be delivered to the president by Wednesday -- one on how to overhaul the nation's detention policy and another on interrogation policy -- would not be ready."

The officials said that the 22 January 2010 deadline for resolution of the cases of the 240 detainees would be met. "They had made substantial progress in reviewing the cases...and had decided that dozens of detainees were eligible for transfer to other countries or were suitable for trial." However, the task force considering detention has been given a six-month extension (in other words, 22 January) for its report, and the task force on interrogation has been given a two-month extension.

Translation: while the officials claimed that "substantially more than 50 cases" of detainees who could be transferred overseas had been processed, as well as a "significant number" of others who would face trial in U.S. federal courts or before a revamped system of military commissions, there is still a set of detainees who cannot be tried because difficulties in the assembly and presentation of evidence (complicated by an appalling lack of organisation, and even loss, of records during the Bush years) preclude a trial and because they are considered too dangerous for release.

That means indefinite detention. And, what's more, the criticisms of politicians, media, and private lobbies will probably rule out bringing any of those difficult cases into the US prison system.

So Camp X-Ray stays open.

Obama to miss Guantanamo deadlines

GREG MILLER and DAVID SAVAGE

Reporting from Washington -- Obama administration officials said Monday they would not meet self-imposed deadlines for deciding what to do with scores of detainees too dangerous to release from the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The delays, involving those who cannot be tried, raise questions about whether the White House can close the prison by January, as President Obama pledged when he took office.

Although officials said the deadline still would be met, a task force studying the issue was expected to deliver its recommendations by Jan. 22 -- exactly one year after Obama issued his executive order to close the prison within a year.

The officials said they had made substantial progress in reviewing the cases of the approximately 240 prisoners at the facility, and had decided that dozens of detainees were eligible for transfer to other countries or were suitable for trial.

But the officials acknowledged that two reports that were supposed to be delivered to the president by Wednesday -- one on how to overhaul the nation's detention policy and another on interrogation policy -- would not be ready.
Officials emphasized the complexity of the issues and their desire to find solutions that would be acceptable to Congress but could withstand a court challenge.

"We want to get this right and not have another multiple years of uncertainty," one senior administration official said in a background briefing with reporters at the White House. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the deliberations.

Civil liberties groups expressed concern Monday that the White House was planning to preserve the ability to hold some prisoners indefinitely.

"The Obama administration must not slip into the same legal swamp that engulfed the Bush administration with its failed Guantanamo policies," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "A promise deferred could soon become a promise broken."

Administration officials said they had not retreated from their January deadline to close the facility. "To meet the requirement of the executive order -- that is our goal," one official said.

But the administration has given a six-month extension to the task force examining detention policy. The delay means the recommendations for devising a system for the indefinite detention of those considered too dangerous to release but impossible to try may not be delivered until Jan. 22.

Officials declined to say how many Guantanamo prisoners might fall into the indefinite detention category, but said no decisions on those cases had been reached.

In contrast, a second administration official said that a review team had resolved "substantially more than 50 cases" of detainees who could be transferred overseas, as well as a "significant number" of others who would face trial in U.S. federal courts or before a revamped system of military commissions.

The White House has granted a two-month extension to a separate task force that Obama created to recommend changes to the nation's interrogation policy.

Officials have said that the panel will probably suggest creating teams of expert interrogators -- drawing on personnel from the CIA, FBI and other agencies -- to question senior Al Qaeda members and other high-value suspects.

During the George W. Bush years, Guantanamo became an international symbol for America's harsh handling of Muslim prisoners. But the Obama administration, like its predecessor, has been unable to devise a single set of legal rules for detaining and prosecuting the men held there.

Under military law, the government could hold foreign fighters and suspected terrorists under the rules of war. But the Obama administration's lawyers have been reluctant to follow the lead of Bush by relying on the power of the commander in chief to hold military prisoners indefinitely without charges. The Supreme Court also may have foreclosed that possibility last year when it ruled that Guantanamo prisoners had a right to challenge their detention in federal courts.

Criminal law sharply limits who can be held and under what circumstances. For example, prosecutors would be required to release a suspect if they had no witnesses against him and no other evidence of his guilt that would be admissible in court.

But the Guantanamo prisoners include accused terrorists allegedly involved in attacks on Americans, including the bombing of the warship Cole. In some cases, the only witnesses were either subjected to harsh interrogations or are in prison abroad. None could testify at a trial.

Booom: U.S. Agrees to Israeli strike on Iran in return for a Palestinian state?

On Thursday, The Times reported that Western and Israeli diplomats are in talks concerning international support for an Israeli pre-emptive strike on Iran, in return for concessions on a two-state solution.

The passage of two Sa'ar 5-class Israeli missile-class Navy ships through the Suez Canal on Tuesday was offered as the proof of seriousness of the Israeli position. The deployment of these two warships in the Red Sea followed the passage of a Dolphin-class submarine capable of launching a nuclear missile strike through the international waterway.

“This is preparation that should be taken seriously. Israel is investing time in preparing itself for the complexity of an attack on Iran. These manoeuvres are a message to Iran that Israel will follow up on its threats” an Israeli defense official said.



Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, said that his government explicitly allowed passage of Israeli vessels, and an Israeli admiral said that the drills were “run regularly with the full co-operation of the Egyptians.” This, alongside the claim that Saudi Arabia would allow Israeli jets to use its air space in any strike against Iran, could be seen as another indication of the high possibility of an Israeli raid- one which would have the backing of pro-Israeli Arab states who oppose a nuclear-armed Iran.

A British diplomat has said that, if agreed, an Israeli strike would be possible “within a year.”

Tel Aviv may be using the “existential threat” of Tehran in order to gain extra time which could bring onboard more conciliatory Palestinian leaders, pushed by the Obama administration. Or it may be seriously focusing on a pre-emptive strike which could, again, give it extra time in the peace process, even if a war between Israel and Iran would cause turmoil in the entire region. However, in the second case, Israel would be losing 'the other', which would shatter geo-political, geo-cultural and geo-economical institutions and could cause an identity crisis.

For me, a Washington-led Western camp would go no further than imposing tougher sanctions against Tehran. As I mentioned above, the war would not be limited to two states and would change the dynamics of the entire region. Therefore, the first scenario sounds more logical: an Israeli bluff calling for the acceptance of Israeli demands from the Palestinian Authority. The Obama administration cannot leave Israel on its own. Pushing Palestinians toward the negotiating table along with extra tangible efforts to bring other Arab states, especially Syria, into a wider negotiation platform seems more logical.

On the other hand, news from the other side of the story comes in, and Hamas completes the last piece of the puzzle. Hamas is enjoying the new conjuncture being shaped by the State of Israel. The first Qassam rocket since June 13th was fired into the western Negev Thursday evening by militants in the Gaza Strip. Hamas wants to show that it should not be overlooked in the negotiation process.

The Clinton Speech: An Immediate Reaction

Video and Transcript: Hillary Clinton Speech at Council on Foreign Relations (15 July)

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On 15 July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a context for U.S. foreign policy, at the outset of the Obama Administration, at a conference held by the Council on Foreign Relations. Two neo-liberal pillars of interdependence and transnationalism support an American  soft power  in which "the ideal values" of the US, such as democracy, transparency, liberty, and freedom, become basis  for peaceful solution.

No need, therefore, to consider the prospect of a capitalism-led inequality. No reason to consider the issues that lay behind inter-state and intra-state disputes. No reference at all to the essence of today's problems, for there are God-given values of Americans which are "always appropriate" for others. Yes, if there are problems, it will clearly be because others --- from blindness or malice --- don't accept those values. As Clinton concluded:

More than 230 years ago, Thomas Paine said, “We have it within our power to start the world over again.” Today, in a new and very different era, we are called upon to use that power. I believe we have the right strategy, the right priorities, the right policies, we have the right President, and we have the American people, diverse, committed, and open to the future... Now all we have to do is deliver.

Song of the Day for Our "War on Terror" (or Whatever We Call It Now)

OK, this song by Paranoid Larry is from 2006, when the Other Guy was President. However, since the Obama Administration has not revoked any of the Bush Administration's executive orders, apart from the promise not to torture, and since it is trying to prevent any judicial decision on surveillance, rendition, or "enhanced interrogation", the sentiments in the music might retain some relevance.

Plus, I like it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-1UX89JtJE[/youtube]

US-Iran-Iraq: Why Were the "Erbil Five" Released?

The Latest from Iran (13 July): Challenge Renewed

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Over the last two years, we paid a good deal of attention to the story of five Iranian officials seized in March 2007 by US forces in Erbil in northern Iraq. It is a measure of how far the world has moved away from the Iraq story, and indeed of how much internal developments in Iran have come to the fore, that the release of the five by the Americans last week received so little attention (apart from Iranian state media, which eagerly featured the return of the men, pictured at left, this weekend).

That's a mistake because this complex tale leaves two long-lasting lessons. The first is that, despite the tensions of Iran's post-election crisis, there are officials in the Obama Administration who want to remove obstacles to long-term negotiations. The second is even more important: as Gareth Porter outlines below in a story for Inter Press Service, the release of the five Iranians points to the emergence of an Iraqi Government that is no longer subject to the demands of the US military:

Behind Detainee Release, a US-Iraqi Conflict on Iran

WASHINGTON - The release Friday of five Iranians held by the U.S. military in Iraq for two and a half years highlights the long-simmering conflict between the U.S. and Iraqi views of Iranian policy in Iraq and of the role of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) there.

For the Barack Obama administration, as for the George W. Bush administration before it, the Iranian detainees had become symbols of what Washington steadfastly insisted was an Iranian effort to use the IRGC to destabilise the Iraqi regime.

But high-ranking Shi'a and Kurdish officials of the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had never shared the U.S. view of the IRGC or of the Iranian role. They have acted on the premise that Iran is interested in ensuring that a friendly Shiite regime would remain in power.

State Department spokesman Ian Kelly expressed concern that the five Iranian detainees being released were "associated with" the Quds Force of the Iranian and could endanger U.S. troops in Iraq.

The idea that the Quds Force was fighting a "proxy war" against U.S. and Iraqi troops was the justification for the George W. Bush administration's decision in late 2006 to target any Iranian found in Iraq who could plausibly be linked to the IRGC.

Three of the five Iranian detainees, who had been grabbed in a January 2007 raid, were working in an Iranian liaison office that had been operating in the Kurdistan capital of Erbil. The U.S. military, hinting that it actually had little information about the Iranians seized, said they were "suspected of being closely tied to activities targeting Iraqi and coalition forces".

Kurdish Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari tried to get the U.S. officials to understand that the Iranians seized in Erbil were not part of a "clandestine network" but were working on visas and other paperwork for travel by Iraqis to Iran. Zebari explained that they were working for the IRGC because that institution has the responsibility for controlling Iran's borders.

After Mahmoud Farhadi was kidnapped by the U.S. military from a hotel in the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya in September 2007, a U.S. military spokesman made the spectacular claim that Farhadi was an IRGC commander responsible for all Iranian operations inside Iraq.

Kurdish officials acknowledged Farhadi's IRGC affiliation, but the Kurdish president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, publicly confirmed that Farhadi was a civilian official of the neighbouring Iranian province of Kermanshah on a "commercial mission with the knowledge of the federal government in Baghdad and the government of Kurdistan".

Although Farhadi had indeed been a military commander at one time, the Kurds pointed out that he was now carrying out only civilian functions.

Iraqi officials also rejected the idea that the IRGC's Quds Force itself was hostile to the Iraqi regime. They had personal relationships with the Quds Force commander Brig. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and they acknowledged that he had ties with all the Shi'a factions in Iraq.

They knew that Iran had trained officers of Shi'a nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and provided some financial support to Sadr. But they also believed that the purpose of that relationship was to exert influence on Sadr in the interest of peace and stability.

After Sadr declared a unilateral ceasefire in late August 2007, the Maliki regime, including Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari, argued publicly and privately to Bush administration officials that Iran had used its influence on Sadr to get him to agree to such a ceasefire. They used the argument to urge the Bush administration to release the Iranian detainees.

Even the Bush administration itself was divided sharply over the Iraqi government argument that Iranian influence on Sadr was benign. The State Department was inclined to accept the Iraqi argument, and privately urged the release of the five in fall 2007.

In December 2007 the State Department's coordinator on Iraq, David Satterfield, went so far as to agree publicly that the Sadr ceasefire "had to be attributed to an Iranian policy decision".

But Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, strongly resisted that conclusion, insisting that it was U.S. military operations against Sadr's Mahdi Army that had brought about the ceasefire. The internal debate was resolved in favour of Petraeus, and the five Iranian detainees were not released.

A series of events in 2008, however, showed that the Iraqi regime was much more comfortable relying on personal relationships with of the Quds Force than on U.S. military might to deal with the problem of the Mahdi Army.

First, Maliki refused in March to allow U.S. ground forces to participate in an operation against the Mahdi Army in Basra. Then, only a few days into the battle, the government turned to the Iranian Quds Force commander, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, to lean on Sadr and broker a ceasefire in Basrah only a few days into a major battle there.

Iraqi President Talabani met with Suleimani Mar. 28-29, 2008 at an Iran-Iraq border crossing and asked him to stop the fighting in Basra. Suleimani intervened to bring about a ceasefire within 24 hours, according to a report by McClatchy Newspapers Apr. 28, 2008.

And in a second meeting a few days later, revealed by Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor May 14, 2008, Suleimani called Sadr the biggest threat to peace in Iraq. The Quds Force commander vowed support for the Maliki regime and referred to "common goals with the United States".

In a gesture to Washington, Suleimani asked Talabani to tell Petraeus that his portfolio included not only Iraq but Gaza and Lebanon, and that he was willing to send a team to Baghdad to "discuss any issue" with the U.S.

Petraeus refused to talk with Suleimani, according to Peterson's account, supposedly on the ground that his offer was part of an Iranian bid to become an "indispensable power broker" in Iraq and thus establish Iranian influence there.

But Petraeus understood that Suleimani had indeed achieved just such a position of power in Iraq as arbiter of conflict among Shi'a factions. "The level of their participation, centrality of their role, should give everyone pause," Petraeus told journalist and author Linda Robinson. "The degree to which they have their hands on so many lines was revealed very starkly during this episode".

In late April, Petraeus tried to get the Maliki regime to endorse a document that detailed Iranian efforts to "foment instability" in Iraq. But instead an Iraqi government delegation returned from Iran in early May saying they had seen evidence disproving the U.S. charges.

Then, Maliki again used Gen. Suleimani to reach an agreement with Sadr which ended a major military campaign in Sadr City just as the United States was about to launch a big ground operation there but also allowed government troops to patrol in the former Mahdi Army stronghold.

Within weeks, the power of the Mahdi Army had already begun to wane visibly. Militia members in Sadr City were no longer showing up to collect paychecks and the Iraqi army had taken over the Mahdi Army headquarters in one neighbourhood.

The Maliki regime saw that Suleimani had made good on his word. Prime Minister Maliki then began calling for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops by the end of 2010. He had opted to depend on Iranian influence rather than U.S. protection.

Nevertheless, the U.S. military has continued to maintain the pretense that it is pushing back Iranian influence in Iraq. The successor to Petraeus, Gen. Ray Odierno, continues to denounce Iran periodically for aiding Shi'a insurgents.