February 16, 2009 archive

1. The LA Times reports Missiles hit compound in Pakistan. “In the most lethal such strike since President Obama took office, suspected U.S. missiles today slammed into a compound near the Afghanistan border, killing about 30 people, by the count of local officials. Most of those killed were thought to be militants linked to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. The wrecked compound belonged to an associate of Baitullah Mehsud, leader of Pakistan’s Taliban movement, and was not far from Mehsud’s own headquarters.”

2. The NY Times reports Pakistan agrees to Islamic law in the Swat Region. “Pakistan government officials said they struck a deal on Monday to accept a legal system compatible with Shariah law in the violent Swat region in return for peace. The agreement contradicted American demands for the Pakistan authorities to fight harder against militants, and seemed certain to raise fears in Washington that a perilous precedent had been set across a volatile region where U.S. forces are fighting Taliban militants operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

3. The LA Times reports that a Conflicted Russia gives and takes on Afghanistan. “Russia seems to have a message for the Obama administration: Go ahead and boost your military effort in Afghanistan — but not without our help… Moscow has sent out increasingly broad offers to open its territory for transport. Last week Russia’s foreign minister even dangled the possibility of transporting weaponry to Afghanistan.”

4. The Guardian reports Terror suspects were tortured in Pakistan under UK policy. “A number of British terrorism suspects who have been detained without trial in Pakistan say they were tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents before being questioned by MI5… The existence of an official interrogation policy emerged during cross-examination in the high court in London of an MI5 officer who had questioned one of the detainees, Binyam Mohamed, the British resident currently held in Guantánamo Bay.”

5. Lastly, the Washington Post reports the CIA helped India and Pakistan share secrets in a probe of Mumbai siege. “The CIA orchestrated back-channel intelligence exchanges between India and Pakistan, allowing the two former enemies to quietly share highly sensitive evidence while the Americans served as neutral arbiters… ‘Intelligence has been a good bridge,’ the U.S. official said. ‘Everyone on the American side went into this with their eyes open, aware of the history, the complexities, the tensions. But at least the two countries are talking, not shooting.'”

Original article, By John Burton and Marge Holland, via World Socialist Web Site:

For the second time in less than a week, lawyers from the Justice Department headed by Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder have embraced the Bush administration’s pseudo-legal argument that the “state secrets” doctrine bars civil lawsuits challenging the methods used in its so-called “war on terror.”

Republicans Begin The Week

Just Wanting To Say No

Even If It Helps A Nation  

To Fix Detroit, Obama Is Said to Drop Plan for ‘Car Czar’



By BILL VLASIC

Published: February 15, 2009

DETROIT – President Obama has dropped the idea of appointing a single, powerful “car czar” to oversee the revamping of General Motors and Chrysler and will instead keep the politically delicate task in the hands of his most senior economic advisers, a top administration official said Sunday night.

Mr. Obama is designating the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the chairman of the National Economic Council, Lawrence H. Summers, to oversee a presidential panel on the auto industry. Mr. Geithner will also supervise the $17.4 billion in loan agreements already in place with G.M. and Chrysler, said the official, who insisted on anonymity.

New world of squalor and exploitation

• Labourers badly paid and work in squalid conditions

• Exploitative middlemen lure poor into huge debts

Tom Phillips in Marabá

The Guardian, Monday 16 February 2009

Day and night the men roll up outside the Correntão supermarket, a roaming army of impoverished workers, searching for a better future and for work. Any work.

Wearing rubber flip-flops, ragged T-shirts and carrying their possessions under their arms in plastic bags, they gather at the meeting point on the outskirts of Marabá, a gritty Amazon city, at Kilometre Six of the Trans-Amazonian highway and wait.

Some are picked up almost immediately and transported to remote jungle camps and farms where they are often forced to work by cattle ranchers and illegal loggers in dangerous and squalid conditions for little or no pay.

Others string hammocks up around the local bus station, waiting for a possible employer to arrive. The rest pile into dozens of tatty boarding houses, known in the Amazon as “pioneer hotels”, where they await recruitment.

USA

4 Cases Illustrate Guantanamo Quandaries

Administration Must Decide Fate of Often-Flawed Proceedings, Often-Dangerous Prisoners

By Peter Finn

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, February 16, 2009; Page A01

In their summary of evidence against Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, a Somali detained at Guantanamo Bay, military investigators allege that he spent several years at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Sudan. But other military documents place him in Pakistan during the same period.

One hearing at Guantanamo cited his employment for a money-transfer company with links to terrorism financing. Another file drops any mention of such links.

Barre is one of approximately 245 detainees at the military prison in Cuba whose fate the Obama administration must decide in coming months.